Quote:
Originally Posted by Moonbase59
I have made good experiences using
- Microsoft YaHei (regular and bold)
- the Kurinto CJK font families, like "Text"
These fonts have the best glyph coverage I know of. |
Thanks. I wasn't aware of Kurinto.
Side Note: But be very careful. Fonts have all different types of licenses. These font licenses specify things like:
- "Is this for personal or commercial use?"
- "Is this allowed to be embedded in books?"
- "Can this be used on websites? Or only offline documents?"
- "Can I change this font?"
- [...]
Kurinto is under the "SIL Open Font License Version 1.1". This license means you can pretty much use it anywhere you want.
Microsoft YaHei is not allowed in ebooks. That font falls under
"Microsoft's Font License". Usually those are allowed only in:
- Windows
- Word Documents
- PDF
When you purchase Windows and/or Microsoft Word, you're paying for fonts like Arial + Times New Roman. At that low price though, they ONLY allow you to use the fonts for X specific uses, NOT allow you to do whatever you want and "redistribute" them.
In ebooks, you're embedding the entire font file inside... and Microsoft (and many other font companies) don't take too kindly to that.
To get that embedding "privilege", you'd have to purchase a completely different license (usually hundreds/thousands of dollars). And usually, you have to purchase each individual fontface separately—one for Regular, one for Italic, one for Bold, BoldItalic, Smallcaps, etc., etc.
See Hitch's 2016 post as an example:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
[...] any font that you actively put in an eBook will most likely need licensing. Most fonts are simply licensed for "desktop publishing" purposes, which is very different than "embedding" or "redistribution." [...] Be aware that licensing a font for redistribution/embedding usually increases the desktop publishing price by a factor of 10 or more. I just today looked at a font that was $79.50 for both Desktop Publishing and Webfonts (websites, essentially) licensing, and it was $795.00 for a single eBook license.
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This is why most people just don't bother to embed these proprietary fonts in their ebooks, because it becomes prohibitively expensive.
Side Note #2: And similarly, this font licensing topic has been discussed to death over the years. Search for this in your favorite search engine:
Code:
licensing font Hitch site:mobileread.com
and you'll see lots of discussion.
Lots of people don't think about it. They think:
"Since
I can use 'Times New Roman' on the computer or my PDFs (Print/InDesign files), I can just toss 'Times New Roman' right in my ebooks!"
or:
"Hey,
Adobe InDesign gives me fonts FROM 'THE CLOUD' for a few dollars a month. I can put this in my ebooks!"
Nope. That's not how it works.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moonbase59
Due to the number of glyphs, all of these are extremely large. So not ideal for embedding, but great for loading onto the device.
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Yep, subsetting takes care of that though. It will remove all the unused characters, so the font file should shrink dramatically.
