[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

The original question was how to get a different font in different chapters based on a change in narrator. Basic CSS knowledge would make that an easy question to answer. The only technical question that caught my eye in this discussion was whether Kindle supports multiple fonts....

Someone mentioned Kindle only allows so many css font calls... I'll be the first to admit I don't have any idea of the internal programming required on a reader to display an html page with the proper styling as defined on an attached CSS sheet. So I don't know how (or why) the reader/device would 'count' the number of times a reference to the CSS was made???

Well, I'm pretty sure (I CONFESS!) that I may well be the source of this bit of murk. I know for a fact, that we (my co) dealt with this sometime between 2012 and 2015. We had to then deal with it, again, in the same bl**dy book, a few years later and we have not seen anything that makes us think that the Kraken of the Deep is not lurking around to do it again.

I'll try to remember what I can, but...dudes. It's been a while. Tex might remember, b/c I think I regaled him with the story at the time and he's still got that steel-trap brain. He hasn't yet reached the tender years where stuff falls out the bottom.

Anyway, we had this guy who had to make this...memoir. That's about all I can call it, a recitation fo his life. He desperately wanted...I think it was 4-5 fonts. I know that Arial was one of them, as it became the big bone o'contention. It also used...something odd, like Apple Chancery. Something quasi-foofy. If any of my Minions or Myrmidons can recall the name of this thing, I will buy and share it with you all, so that you can see what's what.

ANYWAY.. so, we make the book. Nothing really exciting. The usual, in-stylesheet CSS, yadda. And yes, if you are remotely organized, you can easily do the whole thing with CSS, so that p class=Sandy is where Sandy speaks and all that. Is it magical? No, it requires some effort and planning or some sheet luck. We had neither. But for yuor typical author, if they were typically motivated, they could use p styles (from Word, LO/OO, etc.) n their ms and then recode that with proper CSS post-HTML-export, IMHO and it wouldn't be awful.

We could NOT make that freaking thing render. COULD NOT DO IT. It would get to point X in the book and then just...all fonts would stop.

We tried--let's see, all the CSS in the ss. We tried half the CSS in the ss and half in the head. We tried 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd. We tried putting everything in the CSS and then the fnt calls/changes, ONLY, (p = yadda) into inline. NOTHING. Inline font calls, even, old school hardcoding. Nada.

We literally experimented with and watched, as we could remove, say, two paragraphs worth of Arial "font calls" (for lack of a better description--call them p styles, or font calls...we tried 'em all). We'd see two paragraphs worth of Arial appear AFTER the original stopping place (as long as the two we'd removed remained removed), and the moment we put those two back in, the added two would disappear. What seemed to be a hard, mathematical limitation, no matter what.

I know that Kindle doesn't want people defining the font for the entire book and would rather leave that to the customer to choose.

Oh, yes. That's been in there forever, although they've tamped it down since then.

In general, I agree with the sentiment. However, if the author really, really, needs to have a different font to denote some story point, How do they go about making it happen?

A little ePUB, a little HTML and a little CSS and they can make it go. They don't even need that much, if they have, say, AWP and aren't obsessively picky about the markdown. [shrug].

I suppose you could do like Harry Potter and make a "Kindle in Motion" type book where the reader needs to 'opt-in' to see all the special magical features of the book.

I have that KIM. Nice, but...nothing to write home about. One of those, "Look, Ma, I did it!" rather than "look, Ma, you can't live without it" things.

While that probably works, and it is readable, without the magic, on devices that don't support it, it seems like a LOT of work for the eBook coder; and some users may not want to be bothered with the 2 button pushes it takes to enable it...

And many don't even know that they can do that. I have lost count of the number of PPW users or other devices in that family that don't even know that they can/do/should switch to Publisher Font, versus not knowing it exists. I did mean to mention this part, too, as I see it soooo often.

(And then what? With the 8 fonts, all of which will REQUIRE that Publisher Font be turned on to see them? When that's turned off...then what?) You can't very well run around to all their homes and flip the switch, right? But the entire PPW family has the superpower of overriding any/all font embedding, so the only way to make the fonts display is as Publisher Fonts. You either educate your buyer and hope for the best or...well, 99%, they aren't seeing the 8 fonts.

Having said ALL that, I think the problem may just be in the WAY people have been coding the book. If "the number of CSS calls" is the problem, then why not reduce the number of calls? Based on the coding I've seen in most of the books I've read, I can easily believe that people are putting font calls in each paragraph. Instead, they should just put a single call in each body tag.

See above, sweet pea. I still don't know why it broke, what broke it...nada. I just know that each and every vivification effort, Bones would look at me and say "it's dead, Jim."

OBTW, that is also how Kindle recommends you do it:


Although my 'put all styling in the CSS sheet' philosophy cringes at putting styles in the html, I would think that following kindle's own recommendations would work, no?

Anyone experiment with that??

Seriously...if we missed trying something...I don't know what it was. Literally, we tried for some months to make it GO.

We are all prohibited from using a font on the BODY tag and tried that anyway (making the Airal the body and yadda) and NOPE. Didn't work. At that point, we were simply chasing some sort of sign from the heavens, something that would say "hey, you're on a path here!" and we never got one. NEVER. We have no access to all the troubleshooting tools so...it is what it is.

These last 3 pots, you and Quoth...there's a lot to parse/discuss here but this is my best recollection, from...IDK, 8-10 years ago and then some as to the first indicator that we had, that something like this could occur.

AND yes, before you ask, it seemed to be limited to Arial. Not say, Calibri. (Didja ever notice that some people are simply addicted to Arial? You cannot move them off it? Helvetica, Arial...there are simpoly some fonts that folks get their knickers in a twist about...)

Hitch