Embedding fonts - strange issue

[slantybard]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Caecilia Condensed is not an actual font. It's Caecilia diddled by the Kindle software. From what I've read, there is only one version of Caecilia on the Kindle and the Kindle software diddles it to make the others.

This is correct. Last year when I looked through the KPW1 firmware and extracted the fonts from it, there was only one version of Caecilia. The firmware on the device actually modifies the regular Caecilia font to make the condensed version.

[slantybard]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The reason the size has jumped so much is that you did not read/take my advice to subset font. Subsetting removes any fonts not used like say bold italics and reduces the size of the fonts used to just the characters used. Subsetting might be able to be done when doing the conversion/embedding and if not, it can be done via Polish boos. Most eBooks I subset that have my Charis SIL embedded end up like 500-800k. Most are under 1MB.

You are, of course, correct sir. I re-converted and chose to subset the embedded font as suggested this time. End results:
-orginal file 300 kb
-embed file 1800 kb
-embed subset file 900 kb

[Rizla]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The reason the size has jumped so much is that you did not read/take my advice to subset font. Subsetting removes any fonts not used like say bold italics and reduces the size of the fonts used to just the characters used. Subsetting might be able to be done when doing the conversion/embedding and if not, it can be done via Polish boos. Most eBooks I subset that have my Charis SIL embedded end up like 500-800k. Most are under 1MB.

Will that only reduce the ebook file size if the ebook doesn't use italics and / or bold?

[Yolina]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

You could try FontForge. It's open source, ugly, crashes a lot, but if you're lucky, it works.

<snip>

I can't make DejaVu Serif Condensed bolder using FontForge. The fracking application crashes if I try to do that. It did work for the normal DejaVu Serif; barely.

Gaaah there's only 1 font I'd like to fatten slightly (Aller) but FF just keeps crashing every single time with that one too

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rizla

Will that only reduce the ebook file size if the ebook doesn't use italics and / or bold?

It will reduce the size even if all of the four of the fonts are used. What Calibre does is remove from the used font(s) all the characters not in use. And any font not in use will be fully removed. So if your eBook doesn't use bold italic (for example), that font will be fully removed. But what's used will be reduced in size as not every character will be used in all the fonts.

[Barty]

FYI, kindle pw2 obeys negative margin-left(right), so you can use it to reduce blank space on the sides, if that is what floats your boat (does mine). Hey, as long as I'm converting to embed font anyway, may as well dig in and tweak, right?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Barty

FYI, kindle pw2 obeys negative margin-left(right), so you can use it to reduce blank space on the sides, if that is what floats your boat (does mine). Hey, as long as I'm converting to embed font anyway, may as well dig in and tweak, right?

Can you show us a screen shot of the PW2 with no visible margins? Thanks.

Originally Posted by Barty

FYI, kindle pw2 obeys negative margin-left(right), so you can use it to reduce blank space on the sides, if that is what floats your boat (does mine). Hey, as long as I'm converting to embed font anyway, may as well dig in and tweak, right?

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Can you show us a screen shot of the PW2 with no visible margins? Thanks.

EDIT: It does seem to work at -10px. Using -30px didn't work. Must play with this to see how much to use.

Negative margins do work. Here is a sample doc I whipped up in a hurry. It contains negative left margins of different sizes. In my hurry I forgot to include negative right margins. I placed the margin-left CSS in the paragraph tags because it didn't seem to work correctly placing it in the body tag.

.....

Same doc as above but with both negative left and right margins.


....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jswinden

Same doc as above but with both negative left and right margins.


....

Very nice. That is one thing that has bugged me about the Kindle is the forced margins. Getting rid of them so easily is very good.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Very nice. That is one thing that has bugged me about the Kindle is the forced margins. Getting rid of them so easily is very good.

Unfortunately the following CSS wouldn't work:

body { left-margin:-40px; right-margin:-40px; }

Or a class placed inside BODY tag:

.bodyMargins { left-margin:-40px; right-margin:-40px; }

Or this:

* { left-margin:-40px; right-margin:-40px; }

This works fine. I haven't tried DIV tags

p { left-margin:-40px; right-margin:-40px; }

It would have been so much easier if it worked from inside the BODY tag.

[JSWolf]

A left & right margin of -30px works very well for a Kindle Touch.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

A left & right margin of -30px works very well for a Kindle Touch.

As you can see from the screen capture I attached a few posts ago, even down to -40 looks okay on the PW2. I think much beyond that and the text will be too close to the side of the screen. This is a nice trick, but it is still a PITA that we have to manually insert it for books rather than having a built in margin feature on the Kindles.

[Barty]

Nice work, Jack. Thanks.