Quote:
Originally Posted by NiLuJe
@jackie_w: For curiosity's sake, what was the use-case behind the sans-serif thing?
(Unless it was as simple as, err, well, making sure stuff renders with a system-preferred sans-serif font?).
I vaguely recall that this hasn't been done so far because it hasn't bothered anybody overmuch, and it would essentially require more UI & code because everything is terrible in the world of font rendering  .
(IIRC all the details, this was easier to do for monospace because we actually *know* when a font is monospace ). |
To add a bit of context, 66% of the 500+ books currently on my main reader contain at least one of the following in the CSS file. :
- font-family:sans-serif;
- font-family:monospace;
- font-variant:small-caps;
(...
and yes, I know it's weird that I can quote this percentage 
)
To answer your specific question. In addition to chapter headings, sans-serif is often used in books trying to simulate passages where characters are communicating via text message, email, social media, etc.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that every single reading app should be able to handle those 3 basic, generic style rules. By 'handling' I mean that text using any of them should at least 'stand out' from the main body text and from each other. Additionally all 4 sub-families (Regular, Italic, Bold, BoldItalic) should always display correctly (i.e.
no fake italics).
In reality very few apps can handle all 3 (** see note). If you do find one that does and then try to enable its 'select custom font for main body text' option it's almost certain to apply a wrecking ball to those which did work when 'publisher default' (
or some such name) was selected.
I'm much less picky about which individual sans-serif/monospace fonts are used than I am about which serif font is used for main body font. Although it would be nice if every app allowed you to specify all 3 rather than just the last one.
In the absence of a full-blown user option in KOReader would it be possible to just assign 'Noto Sans' as a default generic sans-serif font. It should suffice for English and other western European languages but I'm not sure about Cyrillic, Vietnamese etc.
** Note: With enough effort I've always, so far, been able to make my various devices/apps handle all 3 by a combo of calibre driver hacking (on-the-fly CSS tweaking during send-to-device) plus patching on Kobos.
@BiliBug, Sorry, I didn't mean to derail your thread.
