help with embedding fonts please - Greek, mobi

[AlexBell]

My basic request is for a pointer to a primer to show me how embed fonts which will show all Greek characters in an ePub file and in a mobi file converted from the ePub to mobi.

I'd also like a pointer to a file which will show me the HTML entities and numbers for all the Greek characters.

The background is that I have a client who has done an ebook containing Greek words and has uploaded it to Amazon - she says she sent them a Word document and they produced the mobi ebook. I'm looking at the ebook now on my Kindle 3, and it shows Greek words and characters including characters with accents and diacritics.

However she is not happy with the formatting, and wants me to do an ePub version and another Kindle version.

The way I produce ebooks is to take a Word document, mark it up as valid XHTML 1.1 strict with an HTML editor, package it up as a valid ePub, and then use calibre to produce a mobi version.

I've looked at turkish_template.epub by Doitsu, and think I have the beginnings of some understanding of how to embed fonts. But I would really like a more detailed account of how to do it (suitable for a ten year old) and some advice on how to make sure the Greek characters are properly produced in the mobi version.

I've looked at the DejaVu font website, and so far as I can tell it is able to produce all the Greek characters, but any suggestions as to what font I should use would also be helpful.

[ATDrake]

Here are the Unicode codepages for Greek & Greek Extended with decimal, hex, and HTML entity equivalents if applicable.

The Summer Institute of Linguistics produces freely-reusable freebie fonts specifically for representing Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic-alphabet mixed multilingual documents. I've always thought Gentium was the nicest looking one.

As for Mobi version conversion, Greek characters (including polytonic) have been supported in the internal font since the K2, and as long as you're outputting as Unicode everything should display fine.

[Doitsu]

For some odd reason, the Kindle default fonts (PMN Caecilia LT, Helvetica Neue LT and KindleBlackboxC) support all Greek letters in the Greek and Coptic and Greek Extended) Unicode ranges.
I.e., if you create a .mobi book with Greek text, you won't have to embed any font at all, as long as you make sure that all Greek characters are encoded as Unicode characters. You also don’t have to use HTML entities; simply copy the Unicode characters into your text.
If you plan to use accented Greek characters, you'll need to embed a suitable font for the ePub version, since ADE only supports basic Greek letters.

[Toxaris]

I agree with the posts before. Embed a font which contains the greek characters you need and you are good to go.

[AlexBell]

Many thanks for all the helpfull suggestions. You've give me a lot to explore.