Adding MSWord-type special chacters possible?

[pargoo]

Just wondering if it's possible somehow to paste or import additional special characters into open Sigil documents along the lines of the 'copyright' symbol: ©, only with numerals such as '1' and '2' inside the circle instead of letters like 'C' - in this case - or 'R' like the 'Registered' symbol also known to all: ® ..? Perhaps a plugin permits this?

[Doitsu]

You could create custom shortcuts for special characters. For details, see this post by DiapDealer.

[Toxaris]

Be aware that the font on the reader must have the symbol. Otherwise it will not be visible. The Symbola font is a very good collection of symbols/glyphs. On my site I have made a mapping from the Symbol, Webdings and Wingdings 1,2,3 to their corresponding unicode character. You can use that. By the way, the glyps on that page are from the Symbola font.

Mapping: http://toxaris.nl/glyphs/symbols.html

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by pargoo

Just wondering if it's possible somehow to paste or import additional special characters into open Sigil documents along the lines of the 'copyright' symbol: ©, only with numerals such as '1' and '2' inside the circle instead of letters like 'C' - in this case - or 'R' like the 'Registered' symbol also known to all: ® ..?

Typically these symbols are used very sparingly throughout a document, so I just grab them on a case-by-case basis as needed.

You could:

• Use the Character Map functionality in your OS.
  
  • You could also use a more powerful "Character Map" program, BabelMap:
    
    • http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelMap.html
      
    • Note: This program is also very helpful when you need to find out which font on your computer has X character in it.
  • The "Insert Special Character" button in Sigil/Calibre can be used.
    
  • As Doitsu mentioned, if you use some symbols often, you could add them into Sigil as "Clips".
    
• In the code, you can type in the HTML Entities
  
  • © = ©
    
  • ® = ®
    
  • Here is a list of many HTML Entities: https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref
    
• Copy/Paste from elsewhere
  
  • I personally search on this site and copy/paste the characters.
    
    • http://www.fileformat.info/info/unic...preview=entity
  • As Toxaris mentioned, he recently put up a table of Unicode glyphs for the Symbol + Webdings + Wingdings 1/2/3 fonts:
    
    • http://toxaris.nl/glyphs/symbols.html
      
    • Note: He also implemented this into the next version of his Microsoft Word EPUB Tools Addon. If you created a document in Word using those fonts, his plugin will be able to automatically export those 5 fonts into their Unicode equivalents.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Be aware that the font on the reader must have the symbol. Otherwise it will not be visible.

Indeed. While some of the very common ones like Copyright/Registered symbols SHOULD be on most devices, some of the obscure ones might not be.

We recently discussed Embedding Fonts for symbols in this topic:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=278187

These are very common and you should have no problems using them in your books:

Copyright: ©
Registered: ®

I probably wouldn't rely on these being in the device's fonts (although I haven't done any sort of extensive testing on this):

Circled Digits: ①②③④⑤⑥⑦⑧⑨⓪

These are probably much more rare:

Negative Circled Digits: ❶❷❸❹❺❻❼❽❾⓿

And these? I bet your bottom these wouldn't be on most devices:

Negative Circled Digits (11-20): ⓫⓬⓭⓮⓯⓰⓱⓲⓳⓴

The more obscure the symbols become, your best bet would probably be embedding a font specifically for these characters/glyphs/symbols (see topic above for example + Sample EPUBs).

As Toxaris mentioned, Symbola seems to be a great font for a lot of these obscure symbols.

[Toxaris]

I want to add that if you will include a font that contains that symbol and you will only use that font for that or a few glyphs, strongly consider subsetting the font. That will greatly reduce the font in size.

[Tex2002ans]

So I took a look at Sigil's "Insert Special Character"... and I must admit, it does look a bit sparse:



I went to see how Calibre handled it, and it looks to be done quite well:



although just to stress again... you have to be careful what sort of characters you are inserting.

[Toxaris]

I personally prefer the Sigil one. It has the focus on much used characters for which support in the readers is pretty much garantueed. It seems that Calibre gives the complete Unicode list, but default support is probably none existing. That can give the wrong impression.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I personally prefer the Sigil one. It has the focus on much used characters for which support in the readers is pretty much garantueed. It seems that Calibre gives the complete Unicode list, but default support is probably none existing. That can give the wrong impression.

I noticed Calibre's much greater selection awhile ago but had forgotten (I primarily use Sigil). I just assumed that if you selected a character from a font that isn't standard, Calibre would embed that font for you - or at least tell you that you should and/or provide a little wizard to do so. Looking back I see that was probably naive.

Speaking of little wizards, has anyone thought of an "embed font" button that allows the user to select an external font file/family, imports those files into Sigil, and creates the proper @font-face reference in the CSS?? Seems like that would be a fairly simple combination of existing functionality (add existing files, paste clips) that would smooth the path for all users from novice to expert. It's a fairly common question for noobs, and would save several minutes for the rest.

The only difficulty I could see in creating the code would be determining if the file was normal/bold/italic/bolditalic and applying the proper css. Is there some easy way of determining which properties a font file includes?

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Speaking of little wizards, has anyone thought of an "embed font" button that allows the user to select an external font file/family, imports those files into Sigil, and creates the proper @font-face reference in the CSS?? Seems like that would be a fairly simple combination of existing functionality (add existing files, paste clips) that would smooth the path for all users from novice to expert. It's a fairly common question for noobs, and would save several minutes for the rest.

Former MR member Rubeus uploaded such a plugin. When he left, I uploaded my own version of a plugin that should pretty much meet your requirements:

CSSFromFonts

Originally Posted by Turtle91

The only difficulty I could see in creating the code would be determining if the file was normal/bold/italic/bolditalic and applying the proper css. Is there some easy way of determining which properties a font file includes?

The plugin uses "low level heuristics" to guesstimate the font weight and should be able to properly identify it, if the font designer followed the usual naming conventions.

[KevinH]

Hi Doitsu,

I created this plugin's own entry in the Sigil Plugin Index thread so that people can find it more easily.

Hope this helps,

KevinH

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Former MR member Rubeus uploaded such a plugin. When he left, I uploaded my own version of a plugin that should pretty much meet your requirements:

CSSFromFonts


The plugin uses "low level heuristics" to guesstimate the font weight and should be able to properly identify it, if the font designer followed the usual naming conventions.

[Turtle91]

Awesome - thanks again! I should have noticed that

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I personally prefer the Sigil one. It has the focus on much used characters ...

@Toxaris - If you look at calibre's Insert character Favourites (as shipped) they are very similar to the Sigil set. No half star though

BR

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Toxaris - If you look at calibre's Insert character Favourites (as shipped) they are very similar to the Sigil set. No half star though

BR

Not only that, you can add and remove any character you like to favorties and re-arrange them, so that you can create the set of easily accessible characters that is suited to you, personally.

As for embedding fonts, the calibre editor has a manage fonts tool that has a single click embed button that will embed all fonts referenced in the book automatically. And of course, the tool also has a single click subset embedded fonts button

[KevinH]

Hi Kovid,

Thanks. Those capabilities are integrated into Toxaris's optimize epub plugin but Sigil can definitely think about integrating code that does that into our tree after we get more epub 3 support added.

Take care,

KevinH