Font Best Practices

[AliceWonder]

I think for distribution from my website I'll do two versions - one w/ embedded fonts and one w/o embedded fonts.

This magazine is a print magazine. People who buy the print get free PDF and/or ePub, and people will also be able buy the digital who didn't buy the print.

The whole point of the magazine is to be similar to pulps in style. Similar, not identical, it technically is not a pulp - but a lot of typesetting decisions were taken from pulps of the 30s and 40s.

The ePub already loses a lot of the pulp style typesetting (e.g. two column per page where on an open view with two pages, one of the outside columns is text ads) - I'm trying to keep as much of the ePub similar as I can, hence using same background and same fonts whenever I can.

But yes, I do now think a version w/o embedded fonts and w/o background color set should be available and let the reader choose which to download.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Just remove the widows/orphans in your CSS, there's no need for your to specify, devices have their own defaults.

Note: Although before JSWolf posts... he prefers widows/orphans to be set at 1 for ebooks, so that if there's space for it, the ebook always shoves a line there.

Too late. I already jumped on setting them to 1. I find the large blank spaces at the end of the display due to the default 2 or 3 used for widows/orphans to be more annoying than a single line of text at the bottom/top of a page.

But hey, Jon can learn -- he no longer wants to use 0 for widows/orphans.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

I'm sorry.

I was referencing why I chose Intel Clear Sans as my main font, it's a good readable general font that also works better than serif fonts for dyslexia - which is what brought Amazon's dyslexia font into the discussion.

So the context to me was font to use in the eBook itself.

Of course users should always be able to switch the fonts to whatever works best for them. I wish ePub allowed specification of main text font in the *.opf file so that readers could over-ride it with a GUI but they don't.

But anyway, I was under the impression that you were suggesting that if dyslexia was my concern I should use something other than Clear Sans in my ePub archive.

You are saying that we should use what fonts we want to use. Yet your embedded these fonts will prevent some people from doing just that. Plus, some of us find your choice of fonts rather unsuitable. Why not just leave out these fonts? You are doing more harm then good. Kindle users won't see your fonts and some ePub reader will curse you. Other ePub readers will just never buy your books again. So stop the shenanigans and dump those unsuitable fonts.

Oh and your comment for the fonts should read...

I chose these fonts because I have no idea what I am doing and I don't care about my readers.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Oh and your comment for the fonts should read...

I chose these fonts because I have no idea what I am doing and I don't care about my readers.

JSWolf, you really have to stop this needlessly aggressive and negative commentary, it doesn't do any good.

[AliceWonder]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Oh and your comment for the fonts should read...

I chose these fonts because I have no idea what I am doing and I don't care about my readers.

I won't be bullied into design decisions.

You don't like the fonts. Others do, e.g. Mozilla uses Clear Sans for FireFox mobile.

It's fair to have a dislike of a type face, but opinions are like nostrils - everybody has more than one.

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Hello,
That being said, looking at the fonts I have chosen - as TTF they take 5.8 MB

That would include a large Unicode set of glyphs: Russian, Greek, probably Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc.

If you only need English letters, the font is less than 100kB.
(OTF fonts are more likely to have larger character sets, TTF might just have basic European glyphs. But some OTFs are given the .ttf suffix so you need to inspect the font.)

If such a basic version is not available, you can make one with a font editor.
The subsetting tools should cut the unused glyphs, though I've found them to reduce size by much less than they should; e.g. still several MB font that I only used 4 Chinese glyphs in.

But for script/handwriting, I normally use italic -- that's what it's based on anyway. Upright "Roman" letters are based on carved ones.

[AliceWonder]

So what I need then is to script fontforge to remove the unicode ranges I don't use, and a second script I can run on my xhtml files that verify what ranges they do have so I don't end up accidentally removing a unicode range one of the short stories in my magazine does use.

The liberation fonts are the biggest with ten at over 300 kB each (12 of them for all three variants in all four standard faces) and Clear Sans are next at just under 300 kB for the four standard faces.

The other fonts that are just decorative in nature and not used for much are already down in the 50 kB to 128 kB range and probably already only contain western latin-1.

[AliceWonder]

And while it is true I probably could ditch Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif as neither are used for very much - Liberation Mono is a must because apparently some devices do not even have a monospace font. I suppose monospace isn't used for much in most books, but I do use it.

I specifically want to keep Liberation Sans and Serif though because the metrics match Helvetica and Times and they look better than what some systems substitute for Helvetica and Times when those two aren't available (why so many systems use Arial for Helvetica is really puzzling)

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

So what I need then is to script fontforge to remove the unicode ranges I don't use, and a second script I can run on my xhtml files that verify what ranges they do have so I don't end up accidentally removing a unicode range one of the short stories in my magazine does use.

Why reinvent the wheel? Calibre's Editor can already subset it for you, as can many other tools on MobileRead.

[AliceWonder]

I use a shell script to pack the final .ePub - not GUI tools. I don't like GUI tools. They change from one version to another, they break when a library they are built against changes, etc. They tend to lock you in to their product.

I have very bad experiences with GUI tools. They are useful, but not for critical parts of the workflow.

[AliceWonder]

looks like pyftsubset is the tool to use, and I'm guessing what Calibre does inside.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

And while it is true I probably could ditch Liberation Sans and Liberation Serif as neither are used for very much - Liberation Mono is a must because apparently some devices do not even have a monospace font. I suppose monospace isn't used for much in most books, but I do use it.

Because they work so badly in an environment not designed for monospace.

I specifically want to keep Liberation Sans and Serif though because the metrics match Helvetica and Times and they look better than what some systems substitute for Helvetica and Times when those two aren't available (why so many systems use Arial for Helvetica is really puzzling)

Because it's free and Helvetica is not.

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Why reinvent the wheel? Calibre's Editor can already subset it for you, as can many other tools on MobileRead.

Or Toxaris' fantastic font subsetting tool, which you can find on his website, which you can find in his signature.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

I use a shell script to pack the final .ePub - not GUI tools. I don't like GUI tools. They change from one version to another, they break when a library they are built against changes, etc. They tend to lock you in to their product.

I have very bad experiences with GUI tools. They are useful, but not for critical parts of the workflow.

Calibre is open source. Sigil is open source. All are maintained, pretty much full-time, by volunteers and their developers. Toxaris' font-subsetting tool is not open source, but it's free, as are all the Sigil and Calibre programs and plugins.

GUI does not equal proprietary. Just like the earlier discussion about the Dyslexian fonts, Calibre and Sigil and all their plugins, etc. are completely, 100% FREE and nobody is locking you in or getting rich off you. Calibre is supported by donations--and Sigil is not; its current developers do it for the love of the project and the software and won't even ACCEPT donations.

Hitch

[AliceWonder]

I know GUI != proprietary, but open source also doesn't mean it won't break.

One of the reasons I use CentOS 7 is because it is mostly stable, they don't change APIs in libraries often, but even there on occasion something breaks. And when something breaks, I have three options - fix it myself if I can, pay someone else to fix it, or wait for the volunteers that maintain it to fix it.

Using command line tools makes it a lot easier to fix it myself when something breaks. It also makes it easier for me to ssh in remotely, fix a typo or otherwise change content, and rebuild whatever I was building - even if the added content results in glyphs not used in the previous version.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Or Toxaris' fantastic font subsetting tool, which you can find on his website, which you can find in his signature.

Hitch, Tox took the links to his gadgets out of his sig, they're here ==>> https://toxaris.nl/

BR

[AliceWonder]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Because they work so badly in an environment not designed for monospace.

This I'm curious about.

What about monospace fonts `work badly' in eBooks?

I haven't seen anything I'm doing with them `work badly'.

I wouldn't use them as the main content font, but they are great for some things.

Most books use them for text associated with barcodes (such as ISBN number), LOC number, etc. - and they are also necessary for ASCII art.