Quote:
Originally Posted by AliceWonder
After looking at both the ridiculous license costs as well as obfuscation requirements various font vendors have, I've decided that I will stick with just Open Source and "Free for Commercial Use" fonts in the ePub version of the magazine I'm designing.
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Good choice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AliceWonder
Obviously I'll have to check my magazine when the reader (or user's preference) is to not use the embedded fonts, but how well is WOFF2 supported in ePub readers?
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WOFF support is pretty much nonexistent in actual ereaders out there. You also would be limiting yourself to EPUB3.
For compatibility, it's best if you stick with OTF/TTF.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Personally, I'm not that big a fan of embedded fonts given that all too often, they seem to be used to emulate the old Mac ransom note document style.
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There's also vastly different technologies.
A font designed for Print books =/= a font good for e-ink =/= a font good for phones.
Print might need Serif, Phone might need Sans Serif, and e-ink might need weight adjustments (for example, see JSWolf's Charis SIL fork).
I think it's still just best to not use an embedded font at all, and leave it up to the reader to choose their preferences. Only use embedded fonts in very rare cases for obscure characters (like Polytonic Greek).
Quote:
Originally Posted by AliceWonder
That being said, looking at the fonts I have chosen - as TTF they take 5.8 MB but compressed as WOFF2 they only take 2.1 MB, which for users downloading on slow connections, is a significant saving.
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If you care about font size, what you want to do is Subset your fonts. That will remove all characters besides the ones actually used in the book. This can sometimes cut a font from multiple MBs to hundreds of KBs.
There are a handful of tools out there that do that. Calibre has it built in now too:
When converting, under
Look & Feel, there's a checkbox for
Subset all embedded fonts.
Or in the Calibre Editor:
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edi...embedded-fonts
or there's various other font subsetting tools you can find on MobileRead.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AliceWonder
For web browsers at this point it is very well supported, but I could not find a listing of popular ePub readers and what font technology they actually support.
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EPUBtest.org is a site that showed support across many different devices/readers... but I just visited and the site is missing a ton of info it used to have.
If you look at
Archive.org's 2016 backup, you can see all the compiled information they used to have. And the ebook ecosystem is quite slow to change, so all of that information is still relevant.
As of 2017, here was their
"WOFF Support" test. But even then, their tests mostly focused on Computer/Mobile-focused applications... and not actual ereaders out in the wild.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AliceWonder
Weird (to me) that the file extension rather than the version specified in the .opf file would determine which rendering engine is used.
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That's Kobo's own issue. They created their own KEPUB variant, which is very similar to EPUB3. So to differentiate between KEPUB/EPUB3, they use the
kepub.epub extension.
Side Note: You can read up about differences in
KEPUB on the MobileRead Wiki.