Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Is this a symbol that's available in a font? if so, embed a font with that symbol and do that. Too many publishers take the lazy way out and it looks awful.
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To add a few (like 6) Chinese characters in a book, you need to embed an 8 megabyte font. I have done that, and even when I used font shrinking, it was still 3 or 4 MB of font for a few glyphs. If font shrinking actually gave a font with only the glyphs needed it would be about 10 kB, but none of the utilities I tried did that despite claiming to.
So if it was just one Chinese character, I preferred to use a 1 kB image and size it as the code discussed above. Of course, more than a handful isn't sensible to do that.
But in some books I was reading, not creating, I see there are few words of say Russian or Greek, and they are ugly miss-sized images plonked on the page. If I can work out what they are supposed to be by OCR or otherwise, I replace them with Unicode, as those glyphs are in the default fonts and don't need an embedded font.
I guess these books were created from some process that only recognises English and throws everything else into an image; e.g. it's very common to see asterisks as a scene separator done as images (sometimes a dozen slightly different images), so If I notice that I replace them with text.
Embedded fonts do have uses, of course. One book had a few words in blackletter so adding a 40 kB font replaced the larger images and gave better results.