[frabjous]

It seems that the Calibre Viewer is overriding my embedment with it's defaults, i.e., Times New Roman. Bleah. I don't see a switch to turn that off in the Calibre viewer - do I just not know where to look?

Or does Font Embedding only work with the calibre viewer if the fonts are in a certain place in the epub? Like in OEBPS, or Fonts, or something else? The epub shown had them in the root....

As you probably know there's a way to choose your default fonts by clicking on the hammer button, but Calibre overrides those with embedded fonts for me.

They should be in the proper location relative to the CSS file that calls them. E.g., if the CSS file has

src: url("fontfile.otf") format("opentype");

then the font file should be in the same directory as the CSS file. If it says:

src: url("fonts/fontfile.otf") format("opentype");

then it should be in the fonts subfolder of the folder where the CSS file is, and so on.

Not sure how calibre handles this, but I do think it would be best practice to have these under OEBPS or a subfolder of OEBPS.

It might be worth posting the relevant portion of the CSS file so we can see if there might be issues.

No, the Character for the [ st ] glyph was hand-replaced in the right version of the word 'staring' with Unicode character FB06 - it shows up correctly in the Internet Explorer rendition of the source xhtml. It seems that the conversion out of Calibre changed it from
<p class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent">staring staring</p>
to
<p class="MsoBodyTextFirstIndent">staring staring</p>

I'm assuming that's by design - it can't have just 'accidently' done that.

And, why, yes, there is a "Keep ligatures" checky-boxy thingy in calibre's Look & Feel section, but it doesn't seem to work. Same results on or off. At least, not the way I'm pushing it....

I'd ask about that in the calibre forum, or else open a ticket on the calibre bug tracker.

And I can't seem to put my hand to a rendering display software solution (for epubs, anyway) that inserts ligatures when availalble. And don't get me started on kerning, or hyphenation, or or or....

Newever versions of Firefox do automatic ligature substitution for OpenType fonts. (Well, the common ones anyway--probably not the historical ones like st and ct.) So ePub software built on Firefox like EPUBReader will do it. Of course, I'm not aware of any mobile devices to which that applies, save Netbooks and the like.

With hyphenation and kerning you're probably out of luck. You could use Jellby's script to convert the ePub to suitably-formatted PDF via PrinceXML, however, with kerning and hyphenation.