Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
Why embed a font at all? Any e-reader ever created has at least one internal one, afaik.
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Obviously I don't know for sure as I'm not a publisher
, but at the time when I first saw Charis being embedded I, like many thousands of others, owned a Sony. The Sony built-in font (in fact its only font) at that time was appalling, especially its lack of glyphs for non-Western European languages. IIRC Charis helped to plug some of the gaps (e.g. East European, Cyrillic, ...) so I can see why it may have been appealing to them ... as well as being a no-cost solution.
Maybe they've never grown out of the habit. Actually, I quite like Charis, it certainly looks a lot nicer than that old Sony font. Eventually Sony changed their default to Amasis with much better glyph-coverage, but I'd moved onto Kobos by then.
Personally, as others have said, I would prefer it if publishers only embedded special fonts for things like headings if they must embed them at all. It's quite nice not to have all books look exactly the same. Unlike others I wish they didn't 'style-to-death' the front and back matter. I don't appreciate embedded fonts which only get used in their advertising pages.