Font Best Practices

[AliceWonder]

Hello,

After looking at both the ridiculous license costs as well as obfuscation requirements various font vendors have, I've decided that I will stick with just Open Source and "Free for Commercial Use" fonts in the ePub version of the magazine I'm designing.

That being said, looking at the fonts I have chosen - as TTF they take 5.8 MB but compressed as WOFF2 they only take 2.1 MB, which for users downloading on slow connections, is a significant saving.

Obviously I'll have to check my magazine when the reader (or user's preference) is to not use the embedded fonts, but how well is WOFF2 supported in ePub readers? For web browsers at this point it is very well supported, but I could not find a listing of popular ePub readers and what font technology they actually support.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Obviously I'll have to check my magazine when the reader (or user's preference) is to not use the embedded fonts, but how well is WOFF2 supported in ePub readers? For web browsers at this point it is very well supported, but I could not find a listing of popular ePub readers and what font technology they actually support.

At this point? Kobo's ereaders theoretically support woff/woff2 fonts IF you send the epub as a kepub (the actual file extension is kepub.epub which triggers the use of the epub3 renderer). A stock epub uses the Adobe RMSDK renderer and woff/woff2 is not supported.

Personally, I'm not that big a fan of embedded fonts given that all too often, they seem to be used to emulate the old Mac ransom note document style.

[AliceWonder]

Weird (to me) that the file extension rather than the version specified in the .opf file would determine which rendering engine is used.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

After looking at both the ridiculous license costs as well as obfuscation requirements various font vendors have, I've decided that I will stick with just Open Source and "Free for Commercial Use" fonts in the ePub version of the magazine I'm designing.

Good choice.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Obviously I'll have to check my magazine when the reader (or user's preference) is to not use the embedded fonts, but how well is WOFF2 supported in ePub readers?

WOFF support is pretty much nonexistent in actual ereaders out there. You also would be limiting yourself to EPUB3.

For compatibility, it's best if you stick with OTF/TTF.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Personally, I'm not that big a fan of embedded fonts given that all too often, they seem to be used to emulate the old Mac ransom note document style.

There's also vastly different technologies.

A font designed for Print books =/= a font good for e-ink =/= a font good for phones.

Print might need Serif, Phone might need Sans Serif, and e-ink might need weight adjustments (for example, see JSWolf's Charis SIL fork).

I think it's still just best to not use an embedded font at all, and leave it up to the reader to choose their preferences. Only use embedded fonts in very rare cases for obscure characters (like Polytonic Greek).

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

That being said, looking at the fonts I have chosen - as TTF they take 5.8 MB but compressed as WOFF2 they only take 2.1 MB, which for users downloading on slow connections, is a significant saving.

If you care about font size, what you want to do is Subset your fonts. That will remove all characters besides the ones actually used in the book. This can sometimes cut a font from multiple MBs to hundreds of KBs.

There are a handful of tools out there that do that. Calibre has it built in now too:

When converting, under Look & Feel, there's a checkbox for Subset all embedded fonts.

Or in the Calibre Editor:

https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/edi...embedded-fonts

or there's various other font subsetting tools you can find on MobileRead.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

For web browsers at this point it is very well supported, but I could not find a listing of popular ePub readers and what font technology they actually support.

EPUBtest.org is a site that showed support across many different devices/readers... but I just visited and the site is missing a ton of info it used to have.

If you look at Archive.org's 2016 backup, you can see all the compiled information they used to have. And the ebook ecosystem is quite slow to change, so all of that information is still relevant.

As of 2017, here was their "WOFF Support" test. But even then, their tests mostly focused on Computer/Mobile-focused applications... and not actual ereaders out in the wild.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Weird (to me) that the file extension rather than the version specified in the .opf file would determine which rendering engine is used.

That's Kobo's own issue. They created their own KEPUB variant, which is very similar to EPUB3. So to differentiate between KEPUB/EPUB3, they use the kepub.epub extension.

Side Note: You can read up about differences in KEPUB on the MobileRead Wiki.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

...in the ePub version of the magazine I'm designing.

In making decisions regarding fonts and file formats you may want to consider how you plan to distribute your magazine.

If you do it yourself throgh your own website then you are on the hook for customer support. There will be many users with problems for you to deal with no matter what you do, but there will be vastly more if you make choices out of the mainstream.

If you distribute via stores like Amazon and Kobo, you will need to meet their individual formatting requirements.

[JSWolf]

Alice, what fonts are you thinking of embedding? Most fonts do not have a heavy enough weight to work well enough on an eInk Reader and on some cell phones.

So unless you've tested these fonts on an eInk Reader and some cell phones, you could very well end up with fonts no fit for purpose.

[AliceWonder]

Intel ClearSans in all of its four variants, LiberationMono (weird but it seems monospace doesn't work in many ereaders ??), some hand-written fonts - e.g.

When he opened the notebook, he saw she had written "Alice's Ice Cream Points" on the inside cover.

It would be nice for a span around "Alice's Ice Cream Points" to cause it to use a font designed to look like human printed text.

It's odd though, I just tried a bunch of Android ePub readers and they reminded me why I hate smart phones - seems like underneath these ePub apps are all the same engine and really just exist for no other purpose but to interrupt what I am doing to show me ads.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

It would be nice for a span around "Alice's Ice Cream Points" to cause it to use a font designed to look like human printed text.

That is a cute gimmick, but is it really necessary? Seems like a case of doing something just because you can.

[AliceWonder]

Originally Posted by jhowell

That is a cute gimmick, but is it really necessary? Seems like a case of doing something just because you can.

Of course it's not necessary, but why should something be 100% necessary to be accomplished?

Look around - all businesses are now in prefab buildings and they all look the same. All houses being built all look the same. Do you want every book you read to look the same too?

Don't you get bored where there is no artistic freedom to mix things up a bit? I sure do.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Of course it's not necessary, but why should something be 100% necessary to be accomplished?

Perhaps I am just a bit peeved because I read a book recently on my Kindle where what you want to do didn’t work for me. The publisher put some words in a custom font with thin lines simulating pen and ink writing. It was unreadable on my device until I expanded the font size. It took me right out of world of the book and left me with a bad experience.

This reminds me of something I read recently in another forum about a self-published author who had the bright idea of having each character’s viewpoint be represented by a different font. Yikes!

Put your art into your writing and make the presentation as unobtrusive as possible.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

LiberationMono (weird but it seems monospace doesn't work in many ereaders ??), some hand-written fonts

It should work.

<p class="monospace">This is a monospace test.</p>

CSS:

p.monospace {
     font-family: "Liberation Mono", monospace;
}

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

It would be nice for a span around "Alice's Ice Cream Points" to cause it to use a font designed to look like human printed text.

You could do that too:

<p>She wrote: <span class="cursive">This is a cursive test.</span></p>

CSS:

span.cursive {
     font-family: "NameOfCursiveFont", cursive;
}

But note, anything outside of font-family: serif, sans-serif, monospace are probably not well supported at all... and many devices do not have fallbacks.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...SS/font-family

Note: And like jhowell said, many times these "cursive" fonts are designed for large font sizes and/or Print. They are not designed well for e-ink, low-DPI devices, or small font sizes. So when reading on these devices with your preferred settings, it becomes infuriating/unreadable. This is one of the reasons why people tend towards the poor Android readers discussed below.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

It's odd though, I just tried a bunch of Android ePub readers and they reminded me why I hate smart phones - seems like underneath these ePub apps are all the same engine [...].

Most Android EPUB apps are garbage, and don't follow the standards at all. They focus on being able "read every format under the sun plus the kitchen sink", and force everything into their own poor rendering... which most of the time means throwing away all publisher CSS and overriding it with their own.

This breaks many formatting choices such as:

• centering asterisks for scene breaks
• poetry formatting
• table alignment
• [...]

On Android, what you want to do is read using ones that follow the standards: PocketBook, Gitden, Bookari... or any of the official apps (Kobo, B&N, etc.).

And it's also a good idea to have an actual physical ereader to test on.

Originally Posted by jhowell

This reminds me of something I read recently in another forum about a self-published author who had the bright idea of having each character’s viewpoint be represented by a different font. Yikes!

That sounds... abysmal.

[AliceWonder]

I have it all working with TTF fonts so that's just what I'll use for the time being.
I did get to test a lot of Android ePub readers and it seems Lithium does the best at properly displaying my ePub (which only has minimal CSS at the moment) and also seems to be the least annoying to use.

Perhaps I am just a bit peeved because I read a book recently on my Kindle where what you want to do didn’t work for me. The publisher put some words in a custom font with thin lines simulating pen and ink writing. It was unreadable on my device until I expanded the font size. It took me right out of world of the book and left me with a bad experience.

Yes, that's why I am 100% that any ePub should be readable with default fonts and/or user selected fonts instead of the publisher chosen fonts.

Many people have different vision issue. Dyslexic people often have a font that works wonderfully for them but that is ugly to others, for example. They should be able to specify that font if they want to and be able to read the book w/o missing any nuance.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Perhaps I am just a bit peeved because I read a book recently on my Kindle where what you want to do didn’t work for me. The publisher put some words in a custom font with thin lines simulating pen and ink writing. It was unreadable on my device until I expanded the font size. It took me right out of world of the book and left me with a bad experience.

This reminds me of something I read recently in another forum about a self-published author who had the bright idea of having each character’s viewpoint be represented by a different font. Yikes!

Put your art into your writing and make the presentation as unobtrusive as possible.

I know that client. Been there, done that--and he had 40--FORTY--characters. Forty different fonts--forty-one with the main narrative font. I cannot tell you what I went through during that quote, trying to explain to him that what he wanted to do was a freaking nightmare.

Fortunately, our font embedding fees (per face) happily dissuaded him and he headed on out, down the road to some less-picky formatter. :-) I mean, sure--we'll take almost any work, for almost any client...but I'm very reluctant to take a job that would probably earn me the scorn of the entire community and probably get me in Dutch with Amazon as icing, too.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

Many people have different vision issue. Dyslexic people often have a font that works wonderfully for them but that is ugly to others, for example. They should be able to specify that font if they want to and be able to read the book w/o missing any nuance.

Originally Posted by AliceWonder

I did get to test a lot of Android ePub readers and it seems Lithium does the best at properly displaying my ePub (which only has minimal CSS at the moment) and also seems to be the least annoying to use.

Never heard of Lithium, but I'm betting it's another Webkit-based one.

On the computer, what you want to test on is Adobe Digital Editions (ADE).

This uses RMSDK (EPUB2) + Readium (EPUB3) engines. This is what most of the actual ereaders + major publishers use.

If it's in the Android wild west, you can try your best to create clean code that has graceful fallbacks, but you can't satisfy all of them (because of the previously listed issues).

It's why I try to keep my code as KISS as possible.

Side Note: Most Android readers work on the basic books, but begin to fail once you start getting into EPUB edge cases:

• EPUB3 Footnotes (there's 5 variants, although some are deprecated now)
• proper SVG support
• MathML
• Embedded fonts
• Fixed Format
• [...]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I know that client. Been there, done that--and he had 40--FORTY--characters. Forty different fonts--forty-one with the main narrative font. I cannot tell you what I went through during that quote, trying to explain to him that what he wanted to do was a freaking nightmare.

lol, I remember that one. There's a reason why most Typographers stick with 3, maybe 4 per document.

40 is beyond madness.

Side Note: All this font talk dredged up memories of this forum post.

[ps67]

It would be a torture for the eyes.