Damnable Symbols

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Don't expect embedded fonts to work in mobi.

Well, you can certainly have the expectation, but it may not be realised .

(Although, of course, if you build your book in the new "KF8" Mobi-ish format using the latest "Kindlegen" tool, embedded fonts will work just fine.)

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Well, you can certainly have the expectation, but it may not be realised .

(Although, of course, if you build your book in the new "KF8" Mobi-ish format using the latest "Kindlegen" tool, embedded fonts will work just fine.)

That may confuse users as KF8 is not mobi. It is ePub format except that the container is a Palm PDB file instead of a zip file. It has two halves to maintain compatibility with older Kindles and the mobi half behaves like other mobi files and does not have embedded fonts.

Dale

[grumbles]

A clarification:

The opf file contains the following line (as generated by Sigil):

<item href="Fonts/Math2Regular.ttf" id="Math2Regular.ttf" media-type="application/x-font-ttf" />

the css on the other hand contains:

@font-face {
font-family: math2;
font-style : normal, italic;
src : url(../Fonts/Math2Regular.ttf);
}
.infinity { font-family : "math2";
font-weight : 600;
font-size : 125%; }

The space in my previous example was the result of a ham-fisted attempt to manually edit the opf file. I had renamed the file in case the space in the filename was causing the problem. It wasn't. Sigil got it right.

I know that I can use an html entity. I want to use this particular font because I want the specific style of infinity symbol. If use the "infin" entity it works, it just looks bad.

I'm attaching a stripped down version of the epub that demonstrates the problem. I've replaced all the text with "greeked" text. The problem symbol is in the Prologue chapter.

[DiapDealer]

It was mentioned earlier that it's not advisable to use a font that simply maps an entirely different character to a normal letter... in this case 'w'.

If the infinity entity doesn't look "right," keep in mind that the font used in the Book View of Sigil isn't very indicative of what it will look like on a reader. If it still looks "bad" in ADE, then embed a unicode font that produces an infinity character (using the html entity) that looks "better." (though I think it's a bit overkill to embed a font for a handful of special characters, unless there's absolutely no other way to produce them)

[mmat1]

@grumbles
Well I tossed out the rest, except for the absolute neccessary to test.

I lend a font from an epub here in MR (savage stories), which has a working layout.

I reproduced the fault with the Firefox-Pugin, where "Crom" is shown correctly while "math2" is not.

So i guess it's a problem with your font.

How does it look on your device (see attachment) ?

[grumbles]

Thank you mmat1!

The results are, well... interesting.

With Ubuntu 10.04, the infinity symbol shows up as an empty box but the Crom font displays properly. This happens in both Sigil and the Calibre viewer.

Under XP the results are different. Both Sigil and Calibre display the symbol and text properly. However ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) ignores the stylesheet completely and displays the text with the default font. Both the Math2 and the Crom font are ignored. I assume the same would happen on my reader (a Sony 650).

At this point I fell like turning to a more productive activity such as smashing my head against a concrete wall!

In Reply to DiapDealer: If a unicode font had an appropriate symbol I would have used it but the symbol is part of the page design. The style and appearance are important.

There is a problem with marking scene changes where the actual layout of the page is unknown. On a printed page, if a scene change occurs at the top or bottom of a page, usually and ornament of some sort is used, while scene changes in the page is usually shown with a blank line and the following paragraph is unindented. These separators can get lost when text reflows, a blank line at the bottom of the screen is not obvious and a paragraph that is unindented at the top of the screen is indistinguishable from a paragraph that continues from the previous screen. The only solution to this problem is some sort of graphic indication and what better than an ornament. I know of no unicode font that combines alphanumeric glyphs with ornaments. And all the ornament fonts remap characters to ornaments. It may not advisable to remap characters but there isn't any other way to do it.

I am toying with the idea of taking a unicode font such as DejaVu and adding a set of ornaments and symbols to the font in one of the private areas. Does anyone have any experience with doing this, maybe with a program like Font Forge? This might be one way of solving the problem for once and for all.

Apologies to jgawne. I may have high jacked your thread, but I think that your problem is similar if not the same as mine. I hope that anything that comes to light here helps you as well.

[theducks]

If ADE is ignoring the stylesheet, there is probably a (hard to see) error.

Run that puppy through the CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate_by_upload
CSS Font specification can be extremely fussy about case and nameing.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

If ADE is ignoring the stylesheet, there is probably a (hard to see) error.

Run that puppy through the CSS validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/#validate_by_upload
CSS Font specification can be extremely fussy about case and nameing.

Neither sample work because the @font in both CSS are incorrect.

[grumbles]

OK -- I unzipped demoproblem.epub and ran style.css through the css validator. It told me that there were no errors but gave a warning for line 46:

Property font-family doesn't exist in CSS level 2.1 but exists in [css1, css2, css3]

which is in the @font-face definition.

I am now totally lost. If the "font-family" property is not valid, what do I use? What is correct?

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by grumbles

A clarification:
the css on the other hand contains:

@font-face {
font-family: math2;
font-style : normal, italic;
src : url(../Fonts/Math2Regular.ttf);
}
.infinity { font-family : "math2";
font-weight : 600;
font-size : 125%; }

You font-family in your @font-face must be between quotes. Otherwise it is not valid. If you don't put it between quotes, it must be either a family like Arial, Georgia, etc or a type like serif, non-serif.

[Keroberos]

@grumbles

All CSS errors aside, testing with the Math2Regular.ttf font shows it will not work with ADE.

I am toying with the idea of taking a unicode font such as DejaVu and adding a set of ornaments and symbols to the font in one of the private areas. Does anyone have any experience with doing this, maybe with a program like Font Forge? This might be one way of solving the problem for once and for all.

Don't do this, even if it works it will break on readers that don't support embedded fonts or allows the user to override the embedded font. A better solution would be to use an .svg image and scale it to the desired size (which would also fix your current problem).

[mmat1]

Originally Posted by grumbles

Thank you mmat1!
At this point I fell like turning to a more productive activity such as smashing my head against a concrete wall!

Please, let's try another aproach ...

Thanks to TheDucks & JSWolf: i made an really hefty error in my css example.

After clearing out, the behavior of the fonts didn't change. Math2 will not work in the ff-plugin (and as told by others, in ade as well)

So i ask if there's any font out in the world which will work with ADE ?

I'm sorry to say this, but continuing with this path will probably lead into an in-depht analysis of font files ...

So i'm with Keroberos and suggest to try some graphics instead of fonts.

[Toxaris]

When I need a quotation, I do it in SVG. I create the SVG via CodeCogs.

A lot of fonts do work, alas some don't.

[grumbles]

@Toxaris:
Adding the quotes makes no difference. The CSS validator was also quite happy with the css without quotes. Did you mean equation instead of quotation?

@mmat1:
I tried another font, Lucida Bright Math Symbol. It also fails to work. I will continue to look at this. I need to know what fonts work and why some don't.

I generated a svg file from the infinity glyph -- create a png with gimp and the use autotrace to create a svg file. That worked. I think Inkscape would also create a svg but I couln't quite figure out how to do it. Autotrace worked on the first try.

Does a graphic scale when the user changes the font size? The symbol is used as an ornament at the start of every scene as the first character of a paragraph. If the size of the font is changed, the symbol has to change in the same proportion. I also have no clue about using svg images. Is there a comprehensive tutorial somewhere?

The whole business of embedding fonts seems to be very hit and miss. I lifted the Charis font-face section from the css of a publication and pasted it into another epub I'm working on. I ended up with the text in bold face but the italics in normal weight. I then replaced the font with DejaVu and all was well. If anyone knows where I can find out more, I'd love to hear about it.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by grumbles

The whole business of embedding fonts seems to be very hit and miss. I lifted the Charis font-face section from the css of a publication and pasted it into another epub I'm working on. I ended up with the text in bold face but the italics in normal weight. I then replaced the font with DejaVu and all was well. If anyone knows where I can find out more, I'd love to hear about it.

I know the solution to your CharisSIL bold problem. I have come across such before and with a lot of trial and error, figured out the solution.

Install Notepad++ under Windows and then load in the CSS. Go to the encoding menu and select Encode in UTF-8 without BOM. That will fix the problem with the bold where it should be displaying normal.