Kobo Device Unable to Render Unicode Italics in EPUBs – Seeking a Conversion Solution

[Quoth]

I've never had to do that for epub output. I've only ever had to do it for either of the Palm OS pdb formats.

That proves that the source is using unicode not normally used:

Originally Posted by DNSB View Post
I did some more digging at the file to kill time between periods while watching hockey and found that the Code2001 font from the Code2001 site would display the mathematical sans-serif italic grouping.

Still ugly as homemade sin since the author/translator was likely not very comfortable in English but at least you can read the text.

My comment

Formatted by a nearly clueless web page "hacker". It's not about lack of English but lack of understanding of formatting.

Is referring to the creator of the original document.


I can understand why conversion to ASCII makes it readable. That is hiding the original disastrous formatting choice of unusual unicode.

[DNSB]

@GuyNoodle: I looked at that solution but too much throwing out the baby with the bath water with that process. The book I was testing on, much like your sample, needed some but not all of the Unicode characters transliterated.

@PeterT: I tried a conversion to kepub and then setting Code2001 as the fallback font. It worked but the contrast between look of the base font and the fallback font was painful to my eyeballs.

[GuyNoodle]

Originally Posted by DNSB

@GuyNoodle: I looked at that solution but too much throwing out the baby with the bath water with that process. The book I was testing on, much like your sample, needed some but not all of the Unicode characters transliterated.

Couldn't agree more, but for a quick and dirty solution, this was the best I could come up with after tinkering with Python scripts and ChatGPT to clean it up properly. If this novel were a masterpiece, I might have manually gone chapter by chapter to clean it while preserving the formatting and making it readable on my Kobo. But honestly, this novel is kind of trash—though, for me, it's a guilty pleasure—so I went with the quicker option.