Glo Side-loaded fonts decay

[guma]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Some issues are caused by embedded fonts, some are caused by sideloaded fonts but the majority (in my opinion) are caused by css style code that is poorly written. Some of those code issues are caused by the differences between the renderers used on various devices -- it works on a Sony but not on a Nook or a Kobo type of problem. Kobo suffers here because they are supporting two renderers.

Fair enough. But as far as I remember - correct me if I'm wrong here - these issues with 'incorrect' (or, to put it neutrally, 'undesired') font display appeared only a few firmware versions ago. Before that everything was fine in that regard. Thus there already is/was a solution for a more robust epub rendering that is not so heavily affected by variations in epub css code.

As for having to support two epub rendering engines in one firmware I can see that this requires some additional effort on KOBO's side ... on the other hand nobody forces them to do that and it is no excuse for bad or sub-par performance of either of these rendering engines.

[taming]

Originally Posted by guma

Fair enough. But as far as I remember - correct me if I'm wrong here - these issues with 'incorrect' (or, to put it neutrally, 'undesired') font display appeared only a few firmware versions ago.

Kobo had been "fixing" things like this. From what I understand, the philosophy, at this point, is to let the book files stand on their own, as much as possible--not to get in the way of what a Publisher (or creator) has chosen to submit/do. That is why we are seeing things like Kobo style sheets that are empty as they work their way through the catalog or add new books.

[Ripplinger]

I take back what I said about changing the <em> tag to <i> getting rid of it, it also depends on the font it seems. Avenir Next, Gill Sans, and Kobo Nickel will still display it as bold and not italics. Gothic and Ryumen displays it in italics and bold. All the other fonts displays correctly as italics. Any sideloaded font that I added displays it correctly as italics with the <i> tag.

I'm starting to think their fonts that are included on the device are to blame.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

I take back what I said about changing the <em> tag to <i> getting rid of it, it also depends on the font it seems. Avenir Next, Gill Sans, and Kobo Nickel will still display it as bold and not italics. Gothic and Ryumen displays it in italics and bold. All the other fonts displays correctly as italics. Any sideloaded font that I added displays it correctly as italics with the <i> tag.

I'm starting to think their fonts that are included on the device are to blame.

The issue is mostly with some of the included fonts however I've had a couple of sideloaded fonts that displayed similar issues. For the most part, I tend to avoid the factory fonts since they have poor diacritical support.

Weird toys, these ereaders....

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

After some fiddling with one epub file, Roger and I agree the result looks pretty decent on a Kobo using embedded fonts.

So for those who are interested in Monsieur Mars and madame Venus using embedded fonts on a Kobo, the ebook is attached to this message. I did not subset the fonts and I included a couple of font styles that were unused so the file is larger than it would be for production use.

Regards,
David