Alternate glyph support (font-variant-alternates)

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.)

Reading some of the stories from these forums reminds me as to why I am more than happy to keep my ebook editing as a sideline. Too many people who don't understand that like politics, ebook creation is the art of the possible.

[Quoth]

It's been exhausting, this past 4-6 weeks, trying, repeatedly, to explain that he doesn't understand the ADE software and

Either you're a masochist, desperate for money or care about people that wouldn't get help anywhere else.
I shall peck at any strangers wanting my help! Caw!

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Reading some of the stories from these forums reminds me as to why I am more than happy to keep my ebook editing as a sideline. Too many people who don't understand that like politics, ebook creation is the art of the possible.

My previous line of work petered out in 2008, and this is what I'm stuck with now. Someday, either my Prince will come, or I'll die, or maybe I'll retire and the pain will stop.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Either you're a masochist, desperate for money or care about people that wouldn't get help anywhere else.
I shall peck at any strangers wanting my help! Caw!

This is an odd one--it's a client of our largest client. He's been "happy" with their print layout work to date (although, mind you he sent back edits quite literally saying things like "move this letter 1/32nd of an inch to the left" throughout) and I feel peculiar about the fact that they (the print design house) are on the verge of closing out his project with an unhappy client, because "of us," effectively. Yes, yes, they know he's crazy and all that but I feel a bit compelled to keep TRYING to make him happy or at least satisfied.

He took umbrage at a video I made, trying to explain about ADE and how he was displaying the book in a way that didn't match real devices OR the print book (with ~90+ characters per line plus 5-8 spaces, so nearly 100 char/line, which obviously is wildly different than his print book with has the ubiquitous 60-ish). Apparently he was offended by my tone, which I agree was a bit terse and not obsequious. So...(sigh).

I wish I could solve it, but he's just...nearly impossible.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.)

When dealing with purely "visual" cases:

• Title pages
• Headings
• Captions
• "p.m." vs. "P.M."
• First few words
• First line

using a font-variant won't hurt one bit. Leave the true underlying text alone:

<span class="smallcaps">PhD</span> + 4 <span class="smallcaps">pm</span>

or

PhD + 4 pm or 4 PM

In the cases where smallcaps are actually "important" (emphasis), it may be best to tweak slightly (<span class="smallcaps"> -> <i> or <em>).

The few edge cases I'm not 100% sure on straddle the line between "important" and "visual". For example, some Style Guides or languages require smallcaps in references (see the "Tracking" heading in this fantastic article about Latex+microtype).

We've also discussed the severe disadvantages of "fake small caps" many times over the years. I would take a device that fails in displaying font-variant over F<small>AKE</small> S<small>MALL</small> C<small>APS</small> any day of the week.

Originally Posted by Hitch

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.

It boils back to:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

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

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

I would like to see font-variant: small-caps falling back in a very bad way "with my own eyes". There must be someone, somewhere, who has done testing/images of this.

Since JSWolf is such a strong proponent, there should be ample proof.

Closest I could find is Doitsu in 2017, in which ADE generates its own "fake caps" instead of an actual smallcaps font...

But I still believe font-variant (with flaws) is a better alternative than the other forced "solutions".

Originally Posted by Hitch

[...] (although, mind you he sent back edits quite literally saying things like "move this letter 1/32nd of an inch to the left" throughout)

And let me guess, no Styles were used!

[Quoth]

I agonised on am pm for ages and found FOUR official "styles"

1. Caps 7 AM
2. small caps 7 AM (fake attempted here fails!)
3. dots 7 p.m.
4. plain 7 pm

The New Penguin Dictionary of Abbreviations by Rosalind Fergusson was no help. So I decided:
Has to have space between number and am or pm
Whatever you do, do the same everywhere
I decided that (4) was the most common and easy to search and fix to.

I've also decided that SMALL CAPS are more common in older books and awkward, because in line character styles are more awkward than paragraph styles on conversion. Apart from the ebook display issues.

I listed the 4 options above and my choice on the flyleaf.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I agonised on am pm for ages and found FOUR official "styles"

There's also space/no-space variants:

4 pm + 4pm

Like you said earlier, whatever you decide, just make sure it's consistent.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

There's also space/no-space variants:

4 pm + 4pm

The no space version is used, but not recommended in any style guide I looked at.
Similarly numbers and the units are usually recommended to have a space, 30 mph or 6.0 kg. I use a regex to find numbers with letters immediately after and check.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The no space version is used, but not recommended in any style guide I looked at.

Many newspapers use that style, for example, The Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/guardian...-style-guide-t

times

1am, 6.30pm, etc; 10 o’clock last night but 10pm yesterday; half past two, a quarter to three, 10 to 11, etc; 2hr 5min 6sec, etc; for 24-hour clock, 00.47, 23.59; noon, midnight (not 12 noon, 12 midnight or 12am, 12pm).

Also note, they use '.' to separate hours/minutes instead of the usual ':'.

You could also read a little more here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_a...y_country#Time

There are about a bajillion different ways to write time, just like there are dates.

(Of course, 24 hour clock + YYYY/MM/DD is superior to all. )

Originally Posted by Quoth

Similarly numbers and the units are usually recommended to have a space, 30 mph or 6.0 kg. I use a regex to find numbers with letters immediately after and check.

Units (and SI Units in particular) follow different conventions.

Most of last year I typeset a Physics book, and I learned about all the nitty gritty of those rules.

According to BIPM/NIST, numbers should be attached to units with a THIN SPACE. You want to use thin so they'll display a bit closer together than your usual space:

See the minor difference:

6.0 kg
6.0 kg

"6.0 kg" should really be read as one whole chunk.

You also want it to be non-breakable. You don't want "6.0" to accidentally detach from the "kg" on a new line.

In ebooks, using non-breaking characters besides &nbsp; is a very bad idea.

I would either go with the normal space or painstakingly add the &nbsp; if it's deemed real important:

6.0 kg
6.0 kg

As to properly marking up source documents... I don't see a lot of properly Styled/written documents, I'm only working on things all secondhand.

And a lot of these conventions are geared towards Print, where you have full control over the layout... in ebooks, things are much different.

Side Note On Properly Typesetting Units: It'll probably be a blog post (one of these days...). I'll have to dig out all my notes from months ago, I did some pretty huge writeups with all my sources as I was typesetting the book.

I also took detailed images showing differences before/after, and the spacing issues becomes apparent when working on very dense books full of inline equations/maths/units.

On Tools to Help Correctly Space Units: If anyone's familiar with any to clean up directly in source documents, etc... let me know. The only one I have firsthand experience with is the grammarchecker Antidote, and it detects numbers+units, and is able to insert the correct spacing between.

(In 2018, I wrote a little bit about Antidote here: Does Tool Exist to Spellcheck/Grammarcheck by Category?)

* * *

Anyway, this conversation is meandering much further from the original post (alternate glyphs). I'd be very interested in discussing all these details, but maybe it should be in another topic. It's already hard enough for others finding all these fantastic nuggets of wisdom buried in strange topic names.

[Quoth]

I decided long ago I didn't want to proof / set non-fiction. Too much I don't know.
Then I decided I didn't really like it at all. Hence idea to expand cancelled about 2 years ago. I only created the entity at all originally for one of my sons that wanted a "fake" publisher.

I'd regard the Gridiron, the Teeth Will Make you Fret, as an unreliable implementer of their style guide, besides thinking some aspects are strange.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I decided long ago I didn't want to proof / set non-fiction. Too much I don't know.
Then I decided I didn't really like it at all. Hence idea to expand cancelled about 2 years ago. I only created the entity at all originally for one of my sons that wanted a "fake" publisher.

I'd regard the Gridiron, the Teeth Will Make you Fret, as an unreliable implementer of their style guide, besides thinking some aspects are strange.

MWAHAHAHAHA....

Hitch