Quick Question: What font(s) does the Kobo use

[kadooshka]

Originally Posted by JCKobo

We have a winner! Those are indeed the two fonts on the Kobo Reader.

I have a question for the Kobo rep, and anyone else who might have noticed the same thing:

I've got a combination of ebook types on my Kobo: the 100 preloaded books, 5 or so bought through the Kobo/Borders store, and another couple of 100 non-DRM EPUBs.

With the preloaded books and the Kobo store books, they are totally stripped of formatting (italic, heading tags, images etc.), yet they appear in either of the two nice fonts described above. (I was really disappointed about having bought one book in particular through the Kobo store that doesn't have any of its illustrations.)

Whereas any EPUB I've loaded will retain all the formatting (although font sizes are stripped due to the temporary fix in the new firmware); however, they display in two of the ugliest fonts I've ever seen. I know that none of the EPUBs has @font-face specified (I've created most of the files myself): the default fonts for EPUBs on Kobo appear to be really ugly generic serif or sans-serif fonts.

My question is, why are preloaded or bought books displayed on the one hand with the nice font, but on the other hand totally plain-text, while EPUBs (DRM or otherwise) are displayed in a totally different set of nasty fonts but with proper formatting? Can't we have nice formatting and nice fonts both?

I love the Kobo, but am annoyed that neither its own books nor my own loaded books display totally properly.

Cheers

P.S. An interesting side-note is that the book I mentioned above, which was stripped of its illustrations when loaded through the Kobo app, when downloaded as an EPUB through Adobe Digital Editions, had its images and formatting back, but, despite having a @font-face specified, was instead displayed in the ugly generic fonts.

[farrioth]

Originally Posted by kadooshka

Whereas any EPUB I've loaded will retain all the formatting (although font sizes are stripped due to the temporary fix in the new firmware); however, they display in two of the ugliest fonts I've ever seen. I know that none of the EPUBs has @font-face specified (I've created most of the files myself): the default fonts for EPUBs on Kobo appear to be really ugly generic serif or sans-serif fonts.

I can confirm that fonts in any books other than the internal one's don't look the same. The sans-serif is very obviously different.

Edit: It is possible to display embedded fonts in EPUBs. I'll have a trawl through the CSS and see what code is needed (most of the how-tos I've read don't seem to work unless I'm doing something wrong).

[talios]

Originally Posted by kadooshka

My question is, why are preloaded or bought books displayed on the one hand with the nice font, but on the other hand totally plain-text, while EPUBs (DRM or otherwise) are displayed in a totally different set of nasty fonts but with proper formatting? Can't we have nice formatting and nice fonts both?

Oh man - if NOTHING changes in the next firmware other than ePubs using these nice internal font's I'll be a very happy camper.

The other fonts are just nasty looking.

[kadooshka]

Originally Posted by farrioth

Edit: It is possible to display embedded fonts in EPUBs. I'll have a trawl through the CSS and see what code is needed (most of the how-tos I've read don't seem to work unless I'm doing something wrong).

Yeah, it took me forever to work out from people's explanations of how to make it work, but I've been able to use @font-face tags and font files in the EPUB to make my books bearable to read. It is completely counter-intuitive (and surely non-compliant with EPUB standards...): You have to refer to the font files in the content.opf as if they were in the root of the ZIP file, e.g.

<item id="FontFile" href="FontFile.otf" media-type="application/x-font-opentype"/>

Instead of:

<item id="FontFile" href="Fonts/FontFile.otf" media-type="application/x-font-opentype"/>

Even if the font files are located in Fonts/. As long as they are correctly referred to in the CSS (something like url(../Fonts/FontFile.otf) ). But they must be incorrectly referred to in the OPF. I guess you could just save the font files in the root and they'd be properly referred in the OPF, but not many precompiled EPUBs seem to come with fonts in the root.

I've had this work successfully on all but a very few font files (which may have embedding restrictions, haven't got to the bottom of this yet.)

Is there a Kobo lurker out there who can explain this howler?

Cheers
K

[jhayino]

It looks like the fonts (Georgia, Avenir) should include these characters: āīūṅñṇṭḍḷṃĀŪÑṬḌ. But most of them seem to be missing

Is there some way to install alternate fonts on the Kobo. If not, does the standard method of embedding fonts in the epub work? I want to just drop my epub onto the device.

[pholy]

There is no standard place to install alternate fonts on any reader.

The Kobo, like most ADE readers, does support embedded fonts in epub files. (I just checked.)