Amazon Ember font on kobo (not bold)

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by patrik

I agree. That's why I wrote it used Ember as an example. I think you did a great job of making it generic. Please let me know if you want to change/add anything.

As long as no-one gets banned from MR it's OK as-is. If there is a problem it should only be with the content which was extracted from post #2. In which case, this part also needs to be made generic or use a fictitious font name, e.g. change 'Amazon' to 'Acme' and 'Ember' to 'Amber'.

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The pace you put it looks good to me, but the title is not correct. These directions are not for making external fonts work. A good title would be "Fixing Amazon Ember Bold".

Or something like Fixing Custom Fonts To Display Correctly.

It's an excellent tutorial thank you Jackie.
I have Font Creator but it's on my desktop which hubby uses 95% of the time. Now I can install Font Forge on my laptop and use it instead for this problem.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[cajhin]

I'd like to offer a quick and 'good enough' fix (after spending entirely too much time pimping my Kobo fonts):

Simply drop the bold variants; copy only the Regular and Italic files.

The Kobo (at least the kepub viewer in the latest firmware) will generate bold and bold-italic from the base fonts. It looks ok, just like when you go to the Font Genius and increase the weight. Should be good enough for anyone who is not too picky about typography (most books contain little bold text anyway).

A hand-designed bold font is a bit nicer in the details, for example, an 'ffl' ligature like in 'waffle' may look a little off when bold-italic is generated from the base font, but otherwise it's not an obvious difference.

You can also drop the italic font, but the calculated italic looks a bit funny, especially the 'f' (it really needs to be longer than the regular f)

Thanks a lot @ jackie_w. I've tried many things with FontForge, but I never figured out that the OS/2-Panose-Weight attribute is the culprit.


Update: this only works for .kepub, not for .epub.
So, if you sideload ePubs without converting, you need to follow jackie's instructions to get proper bolded text.