Sage Is it worth escalating this?

[issybird]

Posts deleted for rudeness. Let it go.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

To play devil's advocate, IPA coverage is a bit of a PITA to get right ;p.

(e.g., you can either put the blame of the publisher's side for embedding a font with insufficient coverage; or the reading system's for failing to provide adequate fallback mechanisms and fonts).

We just happen to have two or three contributors that happen to be familiar with the field in KOReader . (We seem to attract linguistics nerds ;p).

Yeah, learning IPA is perpetually on my "I really oughta get around to that" list . But in the meantime, I tried to play by the "rules" and Kobo failed me miserably, so it's back to KOReader for this temporary stray.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

If the three fonts are the ones in the attached screenshots, then yes, they too fail.

Yes, those are the ones. And I'm not surprised they didn't work properly. That's why I added the extra bit on my post as I realised they probably wouldn't be any different.

Arial Unicode MS and Noto Sans both display perfectly. Perhaps the publisher should have embedded a suitable font, but I still feel that a customer should be able to expect that when they a book from from Kobo, they will be able to read it as is on any Kobo, without need of sideloaded fonts.

But, on the other hand, the publisher should know the likely limitations of the readers and apps. They should not be assuming that some esoteric (to most of use) glyph is supported. That the book worked elsewhere is almost a fluke. They worked because those applications fell back to other fonts installed elsewhere. They might have used system supplied fonts that are much larger than practical on a resource constrained device like an ereader. Or they might have used a font you installed because you knew you would need it.

Kobo does tell publishers about this. https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec#supported-fonts has information about font handling and different languages. It recommends embedding a font if there are any concerns.

For me, the biggest issue here is that there is no real indication that something is missing. In this case, there appears to be some extra spaces, but, it isn't always obvious when a something is missing. It would be much better to have something indicating this.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Or they might have used a font you installed because you knew you would need it.

The size of the fallback font would not have been the issue, because whichever font it fellback to is installed on my Sage already.

It's because I recognized that it was not entirely Kobo's fault that I took the refund as store credit rather than "cashback", so they'll still end up keeping my money - and hopefully other Kobo purchasers of this actually not very esoteric book will find the problem fixed, perhaps by Kobo's getting the publisher to embed an IPA font.

[DNSB]

Just going to say that the type of issue mentioned in this thread is why I have Arial Unicode MS and Code2000 on my Kobo ereaders.

[Frenzie]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

Yeah, learning IPA is perpetually on my "I really oughta get around to that" list . But in the meantime, I tried to play by the "rules" and Kobo failed me miserably, so it's back to KOReader for this temporary stray.

Basic IPA is pretty simple, although perhaps a touch less so if you're English. (E.g., stuff like /i/ means what it would in basically every language other than English.) This stuff about Sanskrit is more advanced/less regular.

Incidentally, here's some related reading: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/28277 (The Unicode cookbook for linguists).

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Frenzie

Basic IPA is pretty simple, although perhaps a touch less so if you're English. (E.g., stuff like /i/ means what it would in basically every language other than English.) This stuff about Sanskrit is more advanced/less regular.

Incidentally, here's some related reading: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/28277 (The Unicode cookbook for linguists).

Thanks! In the case of the book I just finished, I would have preferred if the Sanskrit had been rendered in devanagari, which I read easily, but I do understand the value of IPA.