Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
THAT was inspired, Cin! 
( grumble...at least it would BE readable. You should see some of this crap that the creators call "fonts." Un-fracking-believable.) |
Once upon a time, I made my living as a designer and print production guy. I have, um,
opinions about fonts.
I'm now at the point where the first question I ask when looking at a new font is "Would I set
body copy in this font?" If the answer is "No!", the font is unlikely to be added.
I'm at least grateful that the fad for "grunge" fonts is no longer with us.
And while I don't have as many fonts as I once did, I still have an assortment I
might use to set headlines,
once.
An old friend is a DTP specialist at a trade publisher, and one of the folks who does the markup and typesetting based on the book designer's specifications. She wanted to be involved in the eBook side, and I spent some time explaining the differences, like whether the font the designer had specified would be
available on the device the user would use to view the title. If the eBook was issued as PDF with embedded fonts, it wasn't an issue (assuming the device had a PDF viewer.) If it was ePub, Mobi or the like, all bets were off, and the device would likely use a programmed best guess about which font available in firmware was closest to what was specified. She understood.
My current eBook viewer device is an Android tablet, using the open source
FBReader for Android viewer software. FBReader gets the nod because it handles ePub, Mobi, and FB2 "native", and things like PDF, DjVu, and CBR/CBZ via plugins, so I largely don't
care what the format is. (It
doesn't handle DRM, but I don't
get books with DRM and don't care.)
FBReader will attempt to obey specifications in CSS as to margins and fonts. I had to turn it off. Too many volumes had specs that made them unreadable on my device if they were followed.
______
Dennis