InDesign CS5 to EPUB--greek/coptic in Italic

[Momccl]

I am having trouble maintaining the italic formatting on the Greek Times New Roman characters when I export an Indesign book. It exports beautifully for the Kindle, but for some reason does not hold in the EPUB export. I've tried opening the CSS in SIGIL and the span.italic appears to have the correct font-style: italic. I've changed the <span class="italic"> to <i> in the html files and still no change. I've also done this in Dreamweaver and the greek characters are still not italicized. This is a very big deal for many books that I will be working on now. I've also, exported the same book file to .mobi and then used Calibre to see if that would fix it, but nothing I've tried works even after I've unzipped the epub and made changes in the html files. Does anyone have any solutions? This is the only thing holding me up and I've already missed my deadline!!!

[Jellby]

It might be a font problem... Are you embedding fonts? How are you declaring them? Where are you checking the ePUB?

[rhadin]

It is a mistake in InDesign to use a generic italic or bold character style, like you would use in Microsoft Word. To make the translation to EPUB, it is better, and usually works correctly, if you have a character tag that applies a font-specific italic or bold, such as Palatino Italic rather than simply Italic.

[Momccl]

Thanks for your replies!

to jellby--I have also tried using Times New Roman italic character style, but it doesn't work either.

to rhadin-- Yes, I am embedding fonts. I've used SIGIL as well as Dreamweaver to edit files and view the CSS.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Momccl

to rhadin-- Yes, I am embedding fonts. I've used SIGIL as well as Dreamweaver to edit files and view the CSS.

Post a sample of what does not work, including HTML and CSS code. Just a piece of HTML with the italic code and all relevant CSS (inline, in the HTML head, separate files...).

If you are embedding fonts, are you embedding (and declaring) the italic font too?

[Momccl]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Post a sample of what does not work, including HTML and CSS code. Just a piece of HTML with the italic code and all relevant CSS (inline, in the HTML head, separate files...).

If you are embedding fonts, are you embedding (and declaring) the italic font too?

<span class="italic">ε</span> is what is in the code

in the CSS:
span.italic {
font-family: "Times New Roman";
font-weight: normal;
font-style: italic;
font-size: 0.92em;
line-height: 1.20em;
text-decoration: none;
font-variant: normal;
color: #000000;

At this point, greek in italics now shows up in ADE, but not on the Sony Reader PRS-600.

[Jellby]

Where and how is the "Times New Roman" family defined? Is it embedded in the ePUB? Is the italic font embedded too?

(If you are going to embed fonts, you'd probably want to embed fonts that are free or allow full embedding in their license)

This is what I mean:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Crom";
  src: url("../fonts/Crom_v1.1.ttf") format("truetype");
}
@font-face {
  font-family: "Crom";
  font-weight: bold;
  src: url("../fonts/Crom_v1.1.ttf") format("truetype");
}

h1, h2 {
  font-family: "Crom";
}

Note that, in this case, I define the bold "Crom" exactly as the regular "Crom", that is to ensure the same font is used, whether the reader would like to have it bold or not. In your case, you have to define the italic "Times New Roman" differently.

Note too that, even if you do everything perfect, readers can still have bugs.

[Momccl]

Now, I can see the fonts correctly in ADE, but not on the Sony ReaderPRS-600.

Fonts are declared like this:

@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman";
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
src:url("Fonts/TIMES.TTF");
}
@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman";
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
src:url("Fonts/TIMESBD.TTF");
}

[Momccl]

And like this:

@font-face {
font-family: "Times New Roman";
font-style: italic;
font-weight: normal;
src:url("Fonts/TIMESI.TTF");

[Jellby]

Do you embed the actual font files? Are those the correct locations (inside the ePUB file)?

[Faster]

This is really interesting and informative - and if a solution is found I hope it's posted here.
So much to learn!

[Momccl]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Do you embed the actual font files? Are those the correct locations (inside the ePUB file)?

Hi. Yes, they are in the locations mentioned in the declaration. I have recently found that using Palatino Linotype works well for these on ADE AND the Sony Ereader. So, I'm not sure what was happening with Times New Roman, (I also tried Arial and that didn't work on the Sony Ereader). I'll check to see if the file structure and declarations are the same.