[Hitch]

Originally Posted by meeera

We want reading matter to be readable. This was discussed at length in the beginning of this thread. People who design for tablets/computer screens often don't realise that the same fonts on eink can be completely unreadable. That's not (generally) an issue with people designing for print.

Having said that, I did once borrow a paper book that I returned straight away to the library after opening it. It happens.

Yes, but the reality is, probably 99% of all ebooks--ALL--don't even HAVE an embedded bdy font. This isn't a problem in search of a solution; it's a solution claiming that the "problem" is bigger than it is. Could you ever have seen a paper book--or eBook--with unreadably bad fonts? Sure. But generally, or even 2% of the time? No. Hell, even 1% of the time? No.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

It's not a matter of using "fancy fonts" - it is a matter of using fonts that we feel add to the experience of what we are writing.

When doing research on hyphenation, I saw some complaints that using the soft-hyphen character (U+00AD) resulted in a ? glyph on some readers. I don't know for sure, but I would bet the issue is the device manufacturer has a default font w/o that glyph even though it is included in just about every 8-bit encoding since Latin-1 and if I remember correctly from years back is even part of the HTML 4.0 specification for soft hyphenation.

Embedding the font is the only way we can be sure every glyph we use is available - even with common codepoints like U+00AD.

The problem is--if you embed a font and subset it, having forgotten to ADD the soft-hyphen, then when it is deployed in use, beause Reader X has hyphenation, badda-bing, you get the ? or X or whatever that reader uses to shows to indicate a missing character.

I had this happen to us with Amazon, of all places, in the LookInside. Not exactly the same thing, but similar--we had put a body font primary in a given book. Overridable, of course, with a simple click. (And on Paperwhite family devices, only visible when affirmatively selected). Amazon, for reasons I still don't understand, displayed that font in the LITB, not their own Georgia. However, while Amazon didn't override the font--they did override the rendering and rendered the book with ligatures. Which, of course, we had not embedded in the book for all the obvious reasons.

So, what happened? The book displayed on the LITB with a bunch of missing characters/letters. I freely admit, took me a few minutes to figure out WTH had happened! (So now, we embed ligs, too. That's the long way to explain why I'm saying, make sure you embed soft hyphens!)

Originally Posted by doubleshuffle

But hand-tailoring enhances enjoyment. Since I replaced with my own and bolded the heroes' names in all my adventure and crime novels I have been enjoying them twice as much. And don't you dare take that away from me. It's my RIGHT!!!!

Bless you, Dubbshuff, bless you for that.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Speaking of fonts, the answer is that in most cases unless it was Charis SIL embedded, the answer is yes, it did interrupt my reading enjoyment as the fonts are too light. When I had Sony Readers, I was unable to do anything about the fonts on the Reader. That's why I got into making changes to eBooks. (snippage)

And the world is a better place, no doubt, Jon, as we wouldn't have had the divine pleasure of your company here on MR without that. :-)

The problem is that when fonts are embedded, they aren't tested on an eInk screen to see if they are acceptable as is. Yes they may be OK in print, but they are not OK for eInk and in some cases, not even OK on an LCD screen (iPhone, iPad).

Agreed.

I can remove embedded fonts that I don't want and fix formatting that I don't like, but should I have to?

No, Jon, you oughtn't, but what device s it that you're using that doesn't simply allow you to override that? Are there still devices in wide circulation that don't allow the user to simply click and override embedded body fonts? I mean, at Amazon, they've gone the extra step to literally remove a font if it's on the BODY tag. They're not kidding around, lol.

Hitch