[Hitch]

Originally Posted by keress

I've seen articles cautioning against embedding fonts -- articles eight years old. I'm trying to get a feel for what the current wisdom is. I was excited to learn that epub simply uses HTML and CSS. I've been writing both pretty much on a daily basis since 1999. I have a novel written in ms word. I used Kindle to make an ebook, but now I want to use epub. It seems to be offering much better creative control of my material.

I converted the .docx to HTML and then spent FAR too much time taking out all that crappy ms word code. I'll look at a better converter in the future. Any suggestions? I want everything gone except all italics, bolding, links, etc. All those things I'd have to read the whole thing word-for-word to rebuild.

The print version of the book is using two fonts I really like. They're both from Google fonts (TTF fonts). I did all the embedding. It looks great in Sigil and Chrome epub reader. I even got some drop caps to display perfectly with just a minimum of CSS styling.

Then I tried viewing it in Adobe Digital Editions. I'm very disappointed. It's rendering fonts in funky ways. I have a slight variant for the first paragraph in a chapter. It just has no initial indent. And there's a span styling a Drop Cap. In Adobe, that whole paragraph is rendered as bold. No drop cap is displayed. I thought maybe it was getting the 'bold' idea from the drop cap, but that doesn't use a bold, so it makes no sense. It seems Adobe can't handle a simple 'span.'

I don't get it. I'm using very basic, solid CSS tags. All weird MS Word stuff is gone. Why can't Adobe read basic CSS?

So, all the others have addressed your CSS and all that--and yes, you need some work on that.

I'll talk about the wisdom--or not--of embedding fonts. You've seen what your Kindle version actually looks like, and I hope that you've taken it off sale, if indeed it looks like that--and you can pretty much trust the people who've posted here on that front.

You should NOT use embedded fonts unless/until you actually know how to use them. You have made some fundamental mistakes around the fonts--the CSS, like for Bold, etc. and size setting, but you need to learn how to use your fonts correctly and to NOT force the reader to see them on the body, particularly.

For Amazon, that's not even optional; if you force a body font, prepare for the inevitable KindleQualityNotice requiring you to FIX IT.

You need to do wider testing--GoogleChrome and Sigil alone are not remotely adequate, as you've seen. When you set a body font to be 1.2rem and the line-height to 135%, that is also going to be heavily overridden, esp. at Amazon, which will NOT honor that line-height.

And kerning? Fuhgeddaboudit. And what happens, when your reader turns that Gentium body font OFF, but the kerning remains? YOWCH!

So...you need a lot more training, Padawan, before you deploy fonts. When the time comes, you CAN set a "preferred" body font--but not one that gives the reader no choice. You should think about just using chapter head and title page fonts, for now, if you must.

Good luck.

Hitch