[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Oliva

Thanks for all your answers. I found out that, sometimes, fonts that prohibit embedding, do allow using the font for cover images which is then covered by the desktop license. It's dangerous to generalize, though.

I know that text as images should be used only as the last resort. I would only do it for aesthetic effect on chapter starting pages (a decorative glyph > SVG), for scene dividers, for the raised cap for the first paragraph in the chapter, or for the words "The end" on the last page.

There isn't any "font embedding' in a cover. That's...apples and oranges. When you make a book cover, of any kind, paperback, eBook, etc., the final product is an image, effectively--whether it's the laminate cover or paperback cover of the cover, or the digital cover. That's NOT what font embedding IS.

Font embedding means putting the ENTIRE font file--every single glyph--into an eBook or other file type, which would enable the recipient of the file, at the other end, to extract that same file and thus possess the font. You could type every single glyph in a font on a book cover and produce it, and it still would not allow the end book buyer to "extract" that font and own it in a usable way. The end user would not be in any different position than he would if he went to myfonts.com and viewed the glyphs list for that font face.

If you want fleurons (scene dividers), those work far better as images, ANYWAY, because there are still myriad devices that won't display embedded fonts.

So now, all we're talking about are the Dropcaps/Raised initials. If you make those images, the user (or you!) will never be able to find the word/phrase in which those are embedded with search, as something like "Snake thought that..." in search, with an imaged cap, would look like "Xnake thought that..."

You can buy something like Mercer Caps, which are indeed pretty foofy, for a boxed initial cap, or you could just make a dropcap with the body font. OR you could embed a font (in the real meaning of the word) and then subset it, but some would say that's skirting the intent of font licensing, if not the law.

And finally, if it wasn't clear from my cover comment, you can use images of fonts from now until hell freezes over and that's not font embedding. It IS, however, a gross injustice to the buyer of your eBooks. Don't use images of fonts for reading text--ever. (Yes, yes, you can use an image of a word in, say, Hebrew, if it's a single instance or something like that, but I mean, don't make your body images of text, period.)

Hitch