My EPUB Experiences

[charleski]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Because the main body font should (in ebooks) be chosen by the user, not by the book creator.

Can't agree with you in the slightest. One of the main problems with current ebooks is that book creators are not choosing and embedding a font that reflects and enhances the text. Instead, if a font is embedded, it'll be CharisSIL simply because it's free and makes the text look a little different. This just reflects the 2nd-class status that ebooks currently occupy.

Those with particularly poor eyesight should be able to substitute a font that's designed for maximum clarity, but other than that I don't see any reason for the majority of users to be mucking around with the fonts.

We need to adjust the fonts now because the presentational standard of ebooks is so generally awful - that's not a state to which we should aspire.

[frabjous]

I agree with Charleski. Choosing the fonts, even the body text fonts, most appropriate to a given work is a task that should be assigned to the publisher, and is part of the art of publishing. Indeed, I think the authors of the book should have input, feedback and even veto power into it, whenever possible. (Though responsible publishers should resist wild choices on the parts of authors.)

That said, rendering devices should have the ability to override that choice, particularly when it is necessary for people with vision problems, or the font chosen clashes with a particular display medium, but generally, the fonts chosen should be considered part of the book.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

All you need to get the fonts out of an ePub file (unless it's encrypted) is a ZIP program. What tools are required to get embedded fonts out of a PDF file?

Just the open source, cross-platform font editor, Font Forge.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by Ankh

That would not be much of the problem if ePub creation tools supported font subsetting (elimination of glyphs not needed for rendering of that particular content).

From what I know, only Adobe InDesign supports that feature.

I manually subsetted a font, but only because it was a chinese font and I was using less than ten glyphs. (Font Forge did the trick.)

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Sorry, I didn't make myself clear.

If you put a font in an ePub file, then unless the book is DRM protected I can just change the file extension to ".zip", open the file with any ZIP program, and copy the font to my PC, where I can then use it in any way that I wish.

With a PDF file, on the other hand, the font really is embedded there inside the file, and I don't know of any way to get it out again.

Will a licence that is adequate to cover embedding a font in a PDF therefore be sufficient to cover its use with an ePub, where it's more a case of packaging the font in the file rather than making it in any way inaccessible to the user?

The font is easily obfuscated using the xor algorithm to meet the need for embedding. This should meet the licence requirements. You do not need to DRM the file. There are tools in this forum on how to obfuscate a font. The only problem is that ADE uses a slightly different method than the ePUB standard but for now the ADE one is the one everyone uses.

Dale

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The only problem is that ADE uses a slightly different method than the ePUB standard but for now the ADE one is the one everyone uses.

And using the Adobe method causes the ePub to fail epubcheck, no large reader supports the standard method yet, and Apple's iBooks doesn't support any embedded TTF or OTF fonts....

Apart from all that, embedded fonts are well supported :-)

Hopefully ADE will soon read IDPF obfuscated fonts, and so will iBooks.