Alternate glyph support (font-variant-alternates)

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But it doesn't work with ADE 2.0.1 or even ADE 3.x. So it's not a good idea to use it as a lot of Readers or programs with RMSDK are not using the latest version and thus do not support such.

Automobiles don't have a place to hang your spurs either....

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Automobiles don't have a place to hang your spurs either....

Question is, do you want your eBooks to work in a ALL Readers/apps/programs or do you want them to just work in a minority amount of Reader/apps/program?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by roger64

font-feature-settings: "salt";

It indeed does work, but it also modifies some other letters (for example I get a strange h with a tail).

BTW, the developer hast listed all affected letters in this .pdf file.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But it doesn't work with ADE 2.0.1 or even ADE 3.x. So it's not a good idea to use it as a lot of Readers or programs with RMSDK are not using the latest version and thus do not support such.

This CSS3/OpenType is visual alternates only... they would not be missed at all if the device doesn't support it.

& & & & & &

The swashiness of the ampersand doesn't really matter.

Originally Posted by roger64

Is this necro-posting?

Of course not, it's less than a year old, still relevant, and all the posters are still around.

[roger64]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Question is, do you want your eBooks to work in a ALL Readers/apps/programs or do you want them to just work in a minority amount of Reader/apps/program?

This is the perennial "Mobi usefulness" question in another form... one day, we'll have to move on.
These OT features are already several years old and every producer, including Adobe, had time enough to adapt. Shall we wait for ever, shall we give up?

I really wish all users of the main platforms ( Kindle, Kobo, android, pocketbook, and so on) could enjoy these features...

Anyway, these are only alternates. The poors of the earth (those stuck with "old" devices) will get a standard display thanks to a gracious fallback allowed by the OT font (common ampersand, standard numbers, standard everything (instead of oldnums, smcp, hlig, etc.)

To come back to the question, nobody knows how to fill-up these damned red brackets above?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by roger64

This is the perennial "Mobi usefulness" question in another form... one day, we'll have to move on.
These OT features are already several years old and every producer, including Adobe, had time enough to adapt. Shall we wait for ever, shall we give up?

I really wish all users of the main platforms ( Kindle, Kobo, android, pocketbook, and so on) could enjoy these features...

Anyway, these are only alternates. The poors of the earth (those stuck with "old" devices) will get a standard display thanks to a gracious fallback allowed by the OT font (common ampersand, standard numbers, standard everything (instead of oldnums, smcp, hlig, etc.)

To come back to the question, nobody knows how to fill-up these damned red brackets above?

Kobo may allow these font features as long as you convert the ePub to KePub. I might have a go and see if they work.

[roger64]

For the time being, after several different tries, it seems that

font-feature-settings: ss06;

can properly display the alternate ampersand with Calibre at body level.

and to complete it: as the italic font does not have this ss06 stylistic set, I need to use a special span in one more place with

font-feature-settings: salt;

On the screenshot (supposed to be a XVII th century letter) you can see some OT features
- true small-caps
- alternate ampersands
- hlig with st (3)

One screenshot is from Calibre, the second one from Sigil. The small size glitch in the smcp ligature (Qu) is absent from Sigil, so I assume it could be a Calibre glitch (or a glitch coming from my version of Calibre).

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Question is, do you want your eBooks to work in a ALL Readers/apps/programs or do you want them to just work in a minority amount of Reader/apps/program?

They should work in everything unless it's personal use.

[roger64]

They do not work everywhere, but they can be used on many different platforms (plus Calibre and Sigil), this way :

https://github.com/koreader/koreader...s/tag/v2020.04

crengine: support font-variant,

(and font-variant-xxxxx)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

They should work in everything unless it's personal use.

And if you are selling your eBooks, then using font-feature-settings is a very bad idea.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And if you are selling your eBooks, then using font-feature-settings is a very bad idea.

Why? The text will fallback to plain jane normal text if the reader doesn't support it.

Originally Posted by roger64

They do not work everywhere, but they can be used on many different platforms (plus Calibre and Sigil), this way :

https://github.com/koreader/koreader/releases

(and font-variant-xxxxx)

Thanks for this information. Here's the specific bug report (#5821) where they go into more details on adding font-variant support.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Why? The text will fallback to plain jane normal text if the reader doesn't support it.

Good to know. I do test stuff on ancient ereaders to make sure a character doesn't become [] or empty space. Such as ß, ð ì etc. Chinese characters are a problem, so I tried and image, then just had Pinyin Roman transliteration as the size of an inline image can be a problem.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Why? The text will fallback to plain jane normal text if the reader doesn't support it.

But for something like small caps, you will notice it.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Good to know. I do test stuff on ancient ereaders to make sure a character doesn't become [] or empty space. Such as ß, ð ì etc. Chinese characters are a problem, so I tried and image, then just had Pinyin Roman transliteration as the size of an inline image can be a problem.

Anything ASCII is fine, Latin-1 is probably okay, basic Greek letters are fine (α, β, γ)...

But once you get into Chinese, Eastern European letters (Czech's š, Cyrillic), Polytonic Greek (as I've written about many times over the years), then you may want to subset embedded fonts (like my 2017 post on Maths symbols).

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But for something like small caps, you will notice it.

Can you please show me a picture of this happening?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Can you please show me a picture of this happening?

PhD? :-) (Of all the things, JUST went through this with a customer. Insisted that we use smallcaps for PhD, MD, etc. I warned him what would happen if the embedded font wasn't supported and all that, and sho'nuff, it happened and then he made us go back through and "un-small-cap" them, to quote him.)

Of course, we're also on Build 9 of his insistence that we CAN make his tables and equations both a) the relative size, on the page/screen, that they were in his original print PDF pages and b) the same "size," font-wise, as the body text--at the same time. Yup, think about it...

Spoiler:

This prat sent me the Kindle Formatting Guidelines, to "show me" how it "should" be done.

At one point, he insisted that we make images of his equations (which are set between paragraphs, like a blockquote, effectively) by cropping the pdf page full-width--so, making the image of the equation the same width as the original pdf page, including the white-space left and right of the equation, and embed THAT into the eBooks, insisting that then, the equations would always be the "right" size. Of course, they weren't, which I told him would happen before we did that unnecessary work....

Of all the customers y'all have seen me kvetch about, over the years, this one has been the absolute WORST. It's been exhausting, this past 4-6 weeks, trying, repeatedly, to explain that he doesn't understand the ADE software and thus, he's making us jump through hoops that aren't achieving anything, or to shoot for goals that aren't possible, etc.

ANYWAY...assuming that the devices and software "fail" correctly, then using font-feature settings should be relatively harmless, but we all know that we don't know the entire list of which devices support that, which don't and all that good stuff.

Hitch