Does ADE suport only one font without embedding?

[eping]

In spite of the ugly interface and lack of paging, I found any book with many fonts will just showed on ADE with only one ugly font, no matter how many fonts exist on my system. If I want to let these fonts showed, I must embed them, whose size are bigger than book contents.

Is this the general ADE does, not only on my machine(PC)?
Why ADE can not use fonts available on system?
Should I embed every font for every book?

[charleski]

Because Adobe Digital Editions is a system that spans multiple devices, the desktop version emulates the behaviour of ADE on a mobile reader that can't cheat by using system fonts.

The font used is a variant of Garamond, which has been slightly condensed and has some modifications to a few letters, presumably to eliminate hairlines and enhance low-dpi readability. If you think Garamond is 'ugly' I can only shrug.

[wallcraft]

There are always three generic fonts available to an ePub, serif, sans-serif and monospace. They can in principle all be the same, but Adobe does provide separate serif and sans-serif fonts. The default font is serif, and you will get this unless the CSS is exactly right to get an alternative. As you suggest, this requires more than having the font on the machine.

Last time I checked, it was possible to edit the CSS of an ePub to address a font with the Windows Sony Reader, but not with Desktop ADE. See User Stylesheet for Adobe Digital Editions. The same approach works on many, but not all, dedicated e-book readers using mobile ADE. However, they all have different locations for user provided fonts - so the ePub's CSS must be customized for each device.

[eping]

Of course I know Adobe Digital Editions is a system that spans multiple devices, but there're at least two ways to improve this.
1 Add some intrinsic fonts, such as 3 to 5, is this more work than letting each user embed the same into each ePub?
2 All device must have a common interface with ADE, why cann't they add a function to detect available font on the device, is this more difficult than detect the system screen size?
What I can only conclude is that Adobe is grudging.

[sherman]

ADE (generic) has the ability to read a userStyle.css file to set default formatting of epub files. Reading systems may implement this if they wish, although many do not.

Unfortunately, for some reason, the Desktop version of ADE does NOT allow for a custom user stylesheet to be used, therefore one cannot change the default font (or anything else...)
(Or, more accurately, the location of the css file is hardcoded into the binary and cannot be accessed or modified by you or me.)

[eping]

Thank you very much, so I only can wish ADE 2 can support more