Creating epub books using Bangla fonts

[Nabodita]

Hello

I'm working on this project to create ebooks in Bangla. I've decided to start with the epub format because most of the ereaders on the market support epub... besides, I had a chat with Amazon and they assured me that the Kindle does not support Bangla font and they have no workaround for this.... So, epub.

Now obviously, my first concern is that the font has to display correctly on (most) e-readers otherwise this venture is a no-go from the start... From what i understand (and I hope I'm wrong) many e-readers don't support embedded fonts and even if they do, the user can override the formatting specified in the css file.

So, a couple of queries which I haven't been able to solve by googling (although I may be asking the wrong questions...):

1. Is bangla UTF-8 or UTF-16? UTF-8 appears to be declared by default in the content.opf file.. (I suppose this a good time to mention that I don't know xml; I've signed up on Lynda to do an introductory course and I'm also trying to find a good ebook on creating and editing epubs from scratch)

2. Can I get an e-reader to display the font I will embed in the css file? I created an epub and tested it on an iPad 3 and it displayed perfectly. However, I took a look at the css file and found that the font was referenced but the font file itself was not included in the epub (I converted using calibre).. Now, I won't use the iPad as a benchmark because in my uninformed opinion, apple products can do a lot of things that others can't!

After some research, I've decided to use Pages 2009 to create and convert the document to epub and Oxygen as the XML editor for tweaking the epub.

Any answers, comments, discussions or references would be sincerely
appreciated. I will, of course, be asking for help very frequently since I'm really a noob at this!

Thanks in advance
Nabodita

[Toxaris]

If you want a book, get the book from Liz Castro. Not everything is still valid, but the core is good. You can also use the wiki of this site and the site of Jedisaber.

Adding fonts can be tricky, especially if you use iBooks. You need to add a file especially for iBooks to force it to display fonts other than the build in ones. iBooks is one of the worst programs to test an ePUB, because it ignores quite some things from the standard and actually uses its own.

[Nabodita]

Oh dear... I was actually quite excited when the book displayed correctly in the iPad. Thanks for the heads-up. BTW, Adobe Digital Editions doesn't seem to support Bangla language.

I'll get the book by Liz Castro right away and look up the wiki and Jedisaber's site. In the meantime, any information on forcing e-readers to read embeded fonts of complex scripts would be really appreciated...

Thanks, Toxaris, for the prompt reply!

Cheers
Nabodita

[Toxaris]

If Bangla (form of Bengali?) is an LTR language (which I believe it is), it is supported. However, you need to add a font yourself as you have found out.

There are several topics here on mobileread about adding fonts. In general it comes down to adding the font to the ePUB and add references to it in the stylesheet. In the stylesheet you need to add an @font-face and in your elements a reference to the font-familiy.

For iBooks you need to add a 'com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml' file to the ePUB.

Liz Castro also has a blog where she places info every now and then. There are also topics about fonts there.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Nabodita

I had a chat with Amazon and they assured me that the Kindle does not support Bangla font and they have no workaround for this.... So, epub.

AFAIK, Amazon does not officially support Bengali Kindle books and you cannot embed custom Bengali fonts, but at least all current eInk Kindles (K3 and higher) should support them, because the Bengali Unicode range is covered by the system fallback font.

I just did a quick test with this newspaper article and it appears to display fine on my old Kindle K3. You may want to double-check the display on your Kindle Fire, though.

Originally Posted by Nabodita

1. Is bangla UTF-8 or UTF-16? UTF-8 appears to be declared by default in the content.opf file.

You should declare the language code in the metadata section of the .opf file to ensure that readers with Indic languages support render the Bengali text correctly. (All source files should be utf-8 encoded.)

<dc:language>bn</dc:language>

You can embed custom fonts for readers that support them, but, AFAIK, you'll need to add an additional .xml file to epubs for iPads. For more information see this blog post.
Note that most available eInk epub readers are based on a mobile version of ADE and cannot handle Indic vowel signs correctly. (You can test the display of your epubs on non-Apple devices by opening them with the ADE desktop edition.)

Originally Posted by Nabodita

After some research, I've decided to use Pages 2009 to create and convert the document to epub and Oxygen as the XML editor for tweaking the epub.

Many ebook designers use Sigil. You might want to give it a try, too.

(I created the test .epub file with it in a couple of minutes.)

[DomesticExtremis]

ISigil is the way.

If you are going to embed fonts, be sure to use open source ones or ones that have an
open licencse like those from Summer Institute of Language(SIL).

Gnu Free Serif/Sans/Mono seem to cover Bengali

[Nabodita]

Ok

I'm going to process all this information and get back to you...

Thanks so much!

Cheers
Nabodita

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

If Bangla (form of Bengali?) is an LTR language (which I believe it is), it is supported. However, you need to add a font yourself as you have found out.

According to Wikipedia, Bangla is just Bengali. As an Indic script, I guess it uses extensive ligature and glyph substitution, which are encoded in the font files themselves. Therefore support for this language (even if it's LTR) depends on the support for different font features, which may be different from reader to reader.

[Toxaris]

You are right, I hadn't thought about the glyphs.

[Doitsu]

@DomesticExtremis: Usually, SIL fonts are the way to go, but it seems for Bengali, other sites offer more free fonts. In my test file, I embedded the Mukti Narrow font, which has been released under the GPL license.

Originally Posted by Jellby

As an Indic script, I guess it uses extensive ligature and glyph substitution, which are encoded in the font files themselves.

The problem with Indic languages is that most of them have some vowel signs that logically follow the the base letter but need to be displayed left of it (e.g. Bengali vowel I); in Bengali some of these vowels signs apparently also change their shape.

You can easily see these rendering issues if you compare how both ADE and Webkit render the first random heading that I included in the test file. The ADE version is much longer, because ADE cannot handle vowel placement and shaping correctly.

[Nabodita]

Bought the book by Liz Castro but haven't started on it yet.

@Doitsu
Looked at your sample epub; the text in the xhtml file is rendering perfectly but the Table of Contents is not (at least, not in Sigil)... the vowel signs have shifted position and the ligatures are not displayed at all; rather they're showing up as individual letters accented by the 'halant'... from what I've been reading, this is probably a problem with the rendering engine...

Will look into it and keep everyone updated.

Sincerely appreciate all the responses

Nabodita

[Nabodita]

@Doitsu
Just tried to create an epub in Sigil: Added the font I'm using (Vrinda) to the Fonts folder, created a basic stylesheet using your code and modified the content.opf to include the language tag. However, when I try to copy/paste some Bengali text from Word, it's not displaying in the xhtml file... just a lot of boxes... What am I doing wrong?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Nabodita

Looked at your sample epub; the text in the xhtml file is rendering perfectly but the Table of Contents is not (at least, not in Sigil)... from what I've been reading, this is probably a problem with the rendering engine...

Sigil uses the Qt engine, which has some known issues with Indic languages. If the TOC displays fine on your iPad, you'll probably have to live with this limitation.
(You can ask the Sigil team whether this can be fixed, but unless it's an easy fix, they most likely won't fix this.)

Originally Posted by Nabodita

@Doitsu
Just tried to create an epub in Sigil: Added the font I'm using (Vrinda) to the Fonts folder, created a basic stylesheet using your code and modified the content.opf to include the language tag. However, when I try to copy/paste some Bengali text from Word, it's not displaying in the xhtml file... just a lot of boxes...

If you don't see any Bengali text in Book View mode, you most likely forgot to link a stylesheet to your .html files. (Select the .html files in the Book Browser, right-click them and select Link Stylesheet from the popup menu.)

[Nabodita]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

You most likely forgot to link a stylesheet to your .html files.

Yes I forgot that, didn't I.

Well, onwards I go; will get back with updates.

Cheers
Nabodita

[Nabodita]

Just wanted to post an update:

Using Liz Castro's book, I've finally got a test epub ready; I still need to tweak a couple of things though;

In the metadata section of the content.opf file I've declared the name and author of the book in Bangla; is that a bad idea? What I'm trying to ask is will that affect the searchability of the book when I finally upload it for distribution? My guess is yes, but I just want to be sure...

Another question: Is there any way I can use embedded fonts to display the TOC? So far I've tested the sample epub on iPad 3, Aldiko on my android phone and ADE on my laptop. There doesn't appear to be any problem with the book in iBooks but Aldiko is rendering the font in the TOC incorrectly and ADE is displaying boxes where the TOC entries should be. Also, ADE is displaying boxes for the title and author as well.... I take this to mean that the font embedding has worked but since ADE does not natively support Bangla (I confirmed this earlier by testing without embedded fonts but having the font installed on my system), the TOC is displaying incorrectly.

Any thoughts or ideas would be welcome!

Cheers
Nabodita