08-25-2019, 07:01 PM | #1 |
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Font Best Practices
Hello,
After looking at both the ridiculous license costs as well as obfuscation requirements various font vendors have, I've decided that I will stick with just Open Source and "Free for Commercial Use" fonts in the ePub version of the magazine I'm designing. That being said, looking at the fonts I have chosen - as TTF they take 5.8 MB but compressed as WOFF2 they only take 2.1 MB, which for users downloading on slow connections, is a significant saving. Obviously I'll have to check my magazine when the reader (or user's preference) is to not use the embedded fonts, but how well is WOFF2 supported in ePub readers? For web browsers at this point it is very well supported, but I could not find a listing of popular ePub readers and what font technology they actually support. |
08-25-2019, 11:18 PM | #2 | |
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Quote:
Personally, I'm not that big a fan of embedded fonts given that all too often, they seem to be used to emulate the old Mac ransom note document style. |
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08-26-2019, 12:10 AM | #3 |
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Weird (to me) that the file extension rather than the version specified in the .opf file would determine which rendering engine is used.
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08-26-2019, 03:00 AM | #4 | ||||||
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Quote:
Quote:
For compatibility, it's best if you stick with OTF/TTF. Quote:
A font designed for Print books =/= a font good for e-ink =/= a font good for phones. Print might need Serif, Phone might need Sans Serif, and e-ink might need weight adjustments (for example, see JSWolf's Charis SIL fork). I think it's still just best to not use an embedded font at all, and leave it up to the reader to choose their preferences. Only use embedded fonts in very rare cases for obscure characters (like Polytonic Greek). Quote:
There are a handful of tools out there that do that. Calibre has it built in now too: When converting, under Look & Feel, there's a checkbox for Subset all embedded fonts. Or in the Calibre Editor: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edi...embedded-fonts or there's various other font subsetting tools you can find on MobileRead. Quote:
If you look at Archive.org's 2016 backup, you can see all the compiled information they used to have. And the ebook ecosystem is quite slow to change, so all of that information is still relevant. As of 2017, here was their "WOFF Support" test. But even then, their tests mostly focused on Computer/Mobile-focused applications... and not actual ereaders out in the wild. Quote:
Side Note: You can read up about differences in KEPUB on the MobileRead Wiki. Last edited by Tex2002ans; 08-26-2019 at 03:10 AM. |
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08-26-2019, 08:14 AM | #5 |
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In making decisions regarding fonts and file formats you may want to consider how you plan to distribute your magazine.
If you do it yourself throgh your own website then you are on the hook for customer support. There will be many users with problems for you to deal with no matter what you do, but there will be vastly more if you make choices out of the mainstream. If you distribute via stores like Amazon and Kobo, you will need to meet their individual formatting requirements. |
08-26-2019, 11:30 AM | #6 |
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Alice, what fonts are you thinking of embedding? Most fonts do not have a heavy enough weight to work well enough on an eInk Reader and on some cell phones.
So unless you've tested these fonts on an eInk Reader and some cell phones, you could very well end up with fonts no fit for purpose. |
08-26-2019, 07:16 PM | #7 |
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Intel ClearSans in all of its four variants, LiberationMono (weird but it seems monospace doesn't work in many ereaders ??), some hand-written fonts - e.g.
When he opened the notebook, he saw she had written "Alice's Ice Cream Points" on the inside cover. It would be nice for a span around "Alice's Ice Cream Points" to cause it to use a font designed to look like human printed text. It's odd though, I just tried a bunch of Android ePub readers and they reminded me why I hate smart phones - seems like underneath these ePub apps are all the same engine and really just exist for no other purpose but to interrupt what I am doing to show me ads. |
08-26-2019, 07:20 PM | #8 |
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08-26-2019, 07:33 PM | #9 | |
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Look around - all businesses are now in prefab buildings and they all look the same. All houses being built all look the same. Do you want every book you read to look the same too? Don't you get bored where there is no artistic freedom to mix things up a bit? I sure do. |
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08-26-2019, 08:05 PM | #10 | |
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This reminds me of something I read recently in another forum about a self-published author who had the bright idea of having each character’s viewpoint be represented by a different font. Yikes! Put your art into your writing and make the presentation as unobtrusive as possible. |
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08-26-2019, 08:11 PM | #11 | |||
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Quote:
Code:
<p class="monospace">This is a monospace test.</p> Code:
p.monospace { font-family: "Liberation Mono", monospace; } Quote:
Code:
<p>She wrote: <span class="cursive">This is a cursive test.</span></p> Code:
span.cursive { font-family: "NameOfCursiveFont", cursive; } https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...SS/font-family Note: And like jhowell said, many times these "cursive" fonts are designed for large font sizes and/or Print. They are not designed well for e-ink, low-DPI devices, or small font sizes. So when reading on these devices with your preferred settings, it becomes infuriating/unreadable. This is one of the reasons why people tend towards the poor Android readers discussed below. Quote:
This breaks many formatting choices such as:
On Android, what you want to do is read using ones that follow the standards: PocketBook, Gitden, Bookari... or any of the official apps (Kobo, B&N, etc.). And it's also a good idea to have an actual physical ereader to test on. That sounds... abysmal. Last edited by Tex2002ans; 08-26-2019 at 08:25 PM. |
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08-26-2019, 11:01 PM | #12 | |
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I have it all working with TTF fonts so that's just what I'll use for the time being.
I did get to test a lot of Android ePub readers and it seems Lithium does the best at properly displaying my ePub (which only has minimal CSS at the moment) and also seems to be the least annoying to use. Quote:
Many people have different vision issue. Dyslexic people often have a font that works wonderfully for them but that is ugly to others, for example. They should be able to specify that font if they want to and be able to read the book w/o missing any nuance. |
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08-27-2019, 12:39 AM | #13 | |
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Fortunately, our font embedding fees (per face) happily dissuaded him and he headed on out, down the road to some less-picky formatter. :-) I mean, sure--we'll take almost any work, for almost any client...but I'm very reluctant to take a job that would probably earn me the scorn of the entire community and probably get me in Dutch with Amazon as icing, too. Hitch |
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08-27-2019, 07:23 PM | #14 | |||
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On the computer, what you want to test on is Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This uses RMSDK (EPUB2) + Readium (EPUB3) engines. This is what most of the actual ereaders + major publishers use. If it's in the Android wild west, you can try your best to create clean code that has graceful fallbacks, but you can't satisfy all of them (because of the previously listed issues). It's why I try to keep my code as KISS as possible. Side Note: Most Android readers work on the basic books, but begin to fail once you start getting into EPUB edge cases:
Quote:
40 is beyond madness. Side Note: All this font talk dredged up memories of this forum post. Last edited by Tex2002ans; 08-27-2019 at 07:34 PM. |
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08-28-2019, 08:39 AM | #15 |
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It would be a torture for the eyes.
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Tags |
epub, font, woff2 |
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