Embedded Fonts, Want to strip them and still be able to see them in books on Kindle

[JohnnyBook]

Two things about Embedded Fonts.

1) I want to strip the embedded fonts from my books (easy enough) BUT I want to maintain, in the book, the look of the fonts. (So I install those fonts to my computer.)

How do I modify the CSS to point to the fonts on my computer instead of the "to be removed embedded fonts" on the book.


2) Lately I have been doing 95% of my reading through Calibre viewer on my computer typically using the text to speech as I follow along.

BUT Occasionally I want to send that book to my kindle paperwhite, (Send to Device) mostly when I am travelling. I would assume it will NOT include the fonts? (which are now in my computer instead of embedded in the book.)

Or will Calibre (or it can through settings) re-embed the fonts in the book so it looks the same?

[Karellen]

It might help to understand your goal why you want to remove the embedded fonts.

No, Calibre will not re-embed the fonts for you.

[JSWolf]

What you can do is subset the fonts so the ones not used will be removed and the ones used, reduced in size.

[theducks]

I am pretty sure the (Calibre internal) Viewer will not use a System font unless the CSS is modified.

Many devices do not have a wide variety of fonts available. And , Again, the CSS needs to be modified to look in the fonts folder.

An before you subset, Make all corrections, just in case you add/change a character use. make a backup of the font file just in case

[JohnnyBook]

Originally Posted by Karellen

It might help to understand your goal why you want to remove the embedded fonts.

No, Calibre will not re-embed the fonts for you.

Main goal is to reduce the size of the books in my library. Some of the books have enough fonts in them to double or even triple the size of the book. (I had one book series with the same 10 embedded fonts in each.)

Calibre will not re-embed the fonts. Ok. That idea is out.

Originally Posted by theducks

I am pretty sure the (Calibre internal) Viewer will not use a System font unless the CSS is modified.

Yeah I knew I would have to modify the CSS to point to the system fonts.

But like I said, I now read 95% of my books on the laptop instead of my Kindle unless I am travelling.

Yeah double checking corrections IS a good idea before subsetting.

SO far I have not done any subsetting, and I am investigating the idea of removing the embedded fonts (I am sure for 70-80% of the books it would have little effect on reading them (stripping fonts like arial, times new roman, bookerly, futura, or courier) which are just adding size to the book if they are embedded, and using the generic system font will have little impact on the reading the book.

But for some fonts I would want to leave them. (Recently I was reading a techno/space/computers book, and the interface font was tech style and add a little flavor to the reading.

[DNSB]

One acquaintance of mine maintains two copies in their calibre library. An azw3 for his Kindle with the embedded fonts and an ePub for using with calibre's viewer with the fonts stripped. For books he downloads from Amazon, he imports the azw3/KF8 in his calibre library and then using KindleUnpack to generate an ePub. For non-Amazon books, he downloads the ePub, imports it and uses calibre's conversion to generate a azw3/KF8 from it. The workflow is basically, get the ebook into his calibre library and generate the complementary format, update metadata, covers, etc., use Polish to update the metadata for azw3 ebooks and use ModifyEpub to update the metadata for ePub ebooks including stripping embedded fonts.

He played with other workflows for a while but basically, most ebook files are not that large so he settled on his current workflow.

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by JohnnyBook

Main goal is to reduce the size of the books in my library. Some of the books have enough fonts in them to double or even triple the size of the book. (I had one book series with the same 10 embedded fonts in each.)

Calibre will not re-embed the fonts. Ok. That idea is out.

Ok. I've also seen ebooks that contain numerous font files and none or maybe one is in use.
You need to be careful just stripping out fonts. A font file may be included because a special character(s) are needed that are not part of the standard font files. Delete the font file and the character cannot be rendered. See this a lot with the asian style characters.

You would want to remove the files correctly by also editing the CSS file to remove references, otherwise the ebook will be flagged with errors.

[BetterRed]

Fonts are health hazard, so before doing anything with a book's typography I make sure I have a copy of the relevant format file in the book's data folder.