Amazon Ember font on kobo (not bold)

[MarkoRamius]

Hi all,

I just changed my ereader. I was using since 3 years a Kindle (Paperwhite) and decided to change for a Kobo (just bought a H2o 2nd ed.). I didn't prefix my question as I suppose it's not related to the H2o and probably the same for every kobo.

Nice device, i really love it (6.8 screen size is really ideal, to my mind). But that's not the point :-)

I really love the Amazon Ember font I had on the kindle. I tried the different fonts on the kobo, but definitely the Ember is my favorite. So I found and donwloaded the Ember TTF font, transferred it to my kobo. The font is now available, I can choose it, but it seems to be displayed only in bold as you can see on this photo :



Do you have the same behaviour ? Is there another version of the ember font that does display like on a kindle (left on the photo) ?

thanks in advance for any help !

[jackie_w]

Hi MarkoRamius,

Welcome to MobileRead

Although Kobo makes it very easy to load your own fonts there are a few strict rules about filenames and internal font metrics for them to work properly. You may already have done items 1 and 2 but you may not be aware of item 3.

1. The Amazon firmware contains a lot of Ember font files. Make sure you pick a matched set of 4. I suspect the 4 you need all have an internal font name of Amazon Ember (not Amazon Ember Medium or Amazon Ember Bold or Amazon Ember Heavy). The 4 original filenames are:
   

   Amazon-Ember-Bold.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-BoldItalic.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-Regular.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-RegularItalic.ttf

2. Kobos have a strict file naming convention. The first part of the filename needs to match exactly the internal font name of Amazon Ember (not Amazon-Ember). For this particular font, the second part of the italic filename,
   -RegularItalic, needs to be replaced with -Italic. So rename as follows:
   

   Amazon-Ember-Bold.ttf           --> Amazon Ember-Bold.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-BoldItalic.ttf     --> Amazon Ember-BoldItalic.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-Regular.ttf        --> Amazon Ember-Regular.ttf
   Amazon-Ember-RegularItalic.ttf  --> Amazon Ember-Italic.ttf

3. Unfortunately, this one is more complicated. Kobos don't like the Panose Weight font metric Amazon use inside some of their fonts. This needs to be manually corrected with a font editor utility, e.g. FontForge (free) or FontCreator (not free). If you have access to either of these I could give you more detail of how to manually correct the Panose Weight metric.
   
   The original Ember files are using Panose Weight values of Medium (-Regular and -Italic font files) and Demi (-Bold and -BoldItalic font files). Instead of values Medium/Demi Kobo expects values of Book/Bold respectively.

Just to prove it can work here's a screenshot of all 4 variants of Amazon Ember being used correctly in a kepub.

[bartveld]

If you get this working it might be nice to post the fonts here.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bartveld

If you get this working it might be nice to post the fonts here.

They are not allowed to be posted on MR. Given how bold they are on a Kobo, install the patch to allow side loaded TTF fonts to have the weight adjusted and you can make them lighter.

[bartveld]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

They are not allowed to be posted on MR.

That depends on whether they're copyrighted.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by bartveld

That depends on whether they're copyrighted.

I seem to remember that there was some fuss here when people were trying to get hold of the Kindle Bookerly fonts. The reaction to someone posting links to Ember would be the same.

[MarkoRamius]

Hi all and thanks for your replies :-)

Finally I found an easy and very satisfying (at least for me) solution.

Amazon Ember is close to the "Open Sans" font freely available from Google Fonts : https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

I downloaded the zip from google fonts, copied
- OpenSans-Bold.ttf
- OpenSans-BoldItalic.ttf
- OpenSans-Regular.ttf
- OpenSans-Italic.ttf
from the google fonts zip to kobo /fonts folder,
and it works very fine.

Reading with Open Sans is very pleasant (but, again, that's very subjective).

Here's a sample with "Open Sans" on my H2o (2nd ed) :



As you can see by comparison with the pic on my OP, it's looks quite similar to the display on the paperwhite with Amazon Ember, with no need for any tweaking (apart from copying the right files at the right place).

[JSWolf]

I like your solution.

[jackie_w]

I had a PM asking how to use FontForge to change font Panose Weight. As the MR PM system doesn't allow image attachments, I'll post details here for anyone else who might be interested.

1. First take a copy of all 4 original ttf files. It's quite easy in FontForge to overwrite the original if you get a bit click-happy
2. Open FontForge, navigate to xxx-Regular.ttf and double-click it. This will open a new window displaying the glyphs.
3. From the menu goto Element > Font Info.
4. From the left-hand column highlight OS/2 and click the tab labelled Panose. You should see something like the first attached image.
5. You will see a column of metrics, each with a drop-down menu. Weight is the 3rd item. If its value is anything other than Book, click the drop-down and select Book.
6. Click the OK button at the bottom. You will be back to the main window showing the glyphs.
7. To save your updated ttf, click File > Generate Fonts, see second attached image. Navigate to wherever you want to save it and click the Generate button at the bottom. (You may get some kind of pop-up warning. I just ignored it by clicking Yes.)
8. Click File > Close. You will a get a pop-up asking whether you want to save an untitled.sfd file, click Don't Save.
9. That's it for the xxx-Regular font.
10. Repeat steps 2-8 for xxx-Italic.ttf.
11. Repeat steps 2-8 for xxx-Bold.ttf and xxx-BoldItalic.ttf. However, in step 5 select the Weight value Bold from the drop-down menu.

[patrik]

Thanks!

Could this be added to the wiki in order to more easily be found later for those searching?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by patrik

Thanks!

Could this be added to the wiki in order to more easily be found later for those searching?

If you know how to edit wikis, feel free to add this info to any wiki of your choice.

[patrik]

Thanks, I didn't but sort of figured some of it out. Not sure I put it in the best spot. Hopefully staff or someone more experienced will let me know.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by patrik

Thanks, I didn't but sort of figured some of it out. Not sure I put it in the best spot. Hopefully staff or someone more experienced will let me know.

https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_eReader

The pace you put it looks good to me, but the title is not correct. These directions are not for making external fonts work. A good title would be "Fixing Amazon Ember Bold".

[jackie_w]

I'm not sure the Amazon Ember part should be emphasised at all in the wiki. My post #9 was deliberately made as generic as possible. I wouldn't want any of the Moderators jumping on anyone (especially me!).

[patrik]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I'm not sure the Amazon Ember part should be emphasised at all in the wiki. My post #9 was deliberately made as generic as possible. I wouldn't want any of the Moderators jumping on anyone (especially me!).

I agree. That's why I wrote it used Ember as an example. I think you did a great job of making it generic. Please let me know if you want to change/add anything.