Embedded Fonts: Keep or Remove?

[Turtle91]

I would expect this is caused by people not understanding the requirements of embedding a font. They see the correct font in the preview pane and think that means it’s ok - they don’t realize that the preview pane will use any font that is installed on the system (windows, Apple, etc) as well as properly embedded fonts.

It would be nice if there was a user preference to use system fonts or not - with “not” being the default.

There are already plugins to automatically add the correct css for embedding fonts, but “you can lead a horse to water…”

[enuddleyarbl]

EDIT2: Ignore my Edit, below, saying to ignore my OP . That Novik book actually has included font files for the fonts set up in their advertising pages. But, I found a Brandon Sanderson book ("Yumi and the Nightmare Painter", published by Dragonsteel Entertainment (which appears to be the company he set up to publish his works -- so, I guess it is self-published) that's "using" the Palatino font without a font file and without an at-rule. So, as you said, this could be a misunderstanding on self-published books. Though Brandon Sanderson doesn't sound like a person who'd make that kind of mistake.

EDIT1: Ignore my OP, below. I think I figured out what's happening. It looks like whoever put the books together is instantiating the fonts with those @font-face commands in <style></style> blocks on the advertising xhtml pages which I'm deleting (instead of in a separate stylesheet). And, I think they're then using those fonts in the actual stylesheets. That's going to make my examination of the use of those fonts a bit more interesting. /EDIT.

OP: I guess that's possible with the book I mentioned. That's one of Gene Doucette's "Fixer" series. And, those appear to be self-published. But, I'm looking at another book right now ("A Deadly Education" by Naomi Novik) and it appears to be published by Del Rey. It has 6 un-instantiated fonts in it. Oops. See above.

[DNSB]

I've run across the same issue multiple times where fonts that are not standard on my ereader are specified as if they existed on every device.

Of the non-embedded fonts you mention, Baskerville, Futura, and Palatino are available on Apple iOS/iPadOS (probably MacOS but didn't bother booting up the VM to find out) while Droid Serif is the only one available by default on an Android platform. Merriweather, Malibar, and Sorts Mill Goudy are web/installable fonts.

Those fonts are among the ones I toss out. Great Vibes if it is only used for chapter titles and drop caps gets dumped. League Gothic is a dark sans-serif font and much like Great Vibes, tends to get tossed in favour of simple sans-serif unless there is a good reason for keeping it.

[JSWolf]

I too find a lot of font-family lines in CSS specifying fonts, but there are no embedded fonts. If the font specified is serif, I remove the line. If the font referenced is sans-serif, I'll specify sans-serif.

[Maxbet]

One thing in your latest example caught my attention: if the @font-face declarations are only inside those advertising XHTML files, the other chapters normally won't inherit them.
Each XHTML document has its own styling context, so simply keeping the font files doesn't necessarily make them available throughout the book.
I'd check whether the chapters actually load the relevant font declarations through a shared stylesheet. That might explain some of the inconsistencies you're finding.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Maxbet

One thing in your latest example caught my attention: if the @font-face declarations are only inside those advertising XHTML files, the other chapters normally won't inherit them.
Each XHTML document has its own styling context, so simply keeping the font files doesn't necessarily make them available throughout the book.
I'd check whether the chapters actually load the relevant font declarations through a shared stylesheet. That might explain some of the inconsistencies you're finding.

Having embedded fonts just for an advertisement is done for Penguin eBooks.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Maxbet

One thing in your latest example caught my attention: if the @font-face declarations are only inside those advertising XHTML files, the other chapters normally won't inherit them.
Each XHTML document has its own styling context, so simply keeping the font files doesn't necessarily make them available throughout the book.
I'd check whether the chapters actually load the relevant font declarations through a shared stylesheet. That might explain some of the inconsistencies you're finding.

Most of the books I've seen have used a mix of a secondary CSS stylesheet for the advertising content and embedding styles in the XHTML file. The @font-face declarations are, for the most part, in the secondary CSS stylesheet.