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Originally Posted by NiLuJe
@Hitch: Do you happen to have a small testcase for the disappearing fonts thing? It seems eerily familiar, and reminds me of a number of issues with the Kindle's complete mishandling of some custom fonts we encountered with the different Fonts Hacks (leading to the same 'blank' font issue), until one took a hammer to the nail and switched to a custom FreeType library...
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I don't, not right this second. I could come up with a file by asking the person who worked on the book to make a test file of it. The font was Avenir and the disappearing part was Avenir Oblique, FWIW. I mean, Avenir. Not some wonk font from Fonts-R-Us, or wherever. Very frustrating. We're actually now building a "safe fonts list," because we've had so many problems with various fonts that people are mad to have embedded in their books.
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Originally Posted by Tugger
I can't agree that this error is insignificant. I expect perfection, even if it takes several software releases to get there.
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Ah, well. You may be the sort of person who feels that way about everything; or you may just be shiny and new.
Wait until you screw around with iBooks. Now, THAT is fun. I gave up expecting absolute perfection about 1500 books ago. I still want it; I still strive for it--but I know that when you cannot control the final, final,
truly final output (the product that the reader sees, and how they see it), that any feeling I ever have of a book's "perfection" is probably an illusion or delusion on my part. The retailers and the software makers change their software/firmware/hardware so fast and so often you can't keep up, and the changes that they make
never make it easier on us. And inevitably, as each changes, each grows further away from the ePUB standards, not closer. Of course, Amazon doesn't have an international MOBI standard, so they can pretty much do what they want (although the K8 follows a boatload of the ePUB formatting we use--
but not all).
And readers? On myriad devices, I know factually that most don't even know HOW to choose "publisher fonts" or "publisher view," which means that they don't SEE what we have created--ever--in the first damn place.
And don't forget the various reading apps...Bluefire and its brethren. Oh, and, seen ADE 2.0 yet? Tried any outline-style lists? Ha!
Not to sound jaded or anything. We all want our books to be beautiful. But in the commercial biz, we don't control what we get to layout/convert, and we don't control the 60+ devices out there...it's not like print, where you can control every single aspect. It simply isn't. To me, the "go to beginning" thing in K3/4 is just..so
minor I can't even spare a braincell for it. Many far larger issues haunting devices, at least in my opinion and experience. {shrug}. For whatever that's worth.
Hitch