Content Sideloading Fonts

[binaryhermit]

Fair enough, I suppose.
I just thought it had to be said.
(And a quick google search suggests the kindle firmware version that first added sideloaded fonts seems to have come out in early June 2018)

[pghaworth]

Originally Posted by binaryhermit

Fair enough, I suppose.
I just thought it had to be said.
(And a quick google search suggests the kindle firmware version that first added sideloaded fonts seems to have come out in early June 2018)

thanks. that's what I've heard and I was very excited when I got my Oasis 3. too bad it was faulty. form factor not right for me anyway so I let it go. my PW2s were already dead by then. I loved them and they were perfect for me. I don't care for the new one.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Before you install Bitter, you'll want to convert it from OTF to TTF. Otherwise you cannot increase the weight of the font should you want to using your Kobo Clara HD.

TTF is strictly less capable than OTF: converting it if the device you're using now can handle OTF is probably a bad idea, since if the font uses OTF-specific features and the renderer on your e-reader can use those features, you'll lose them. (OTF has a great many features that are not yet in wide use, but with the passage of time more of them will probably come into use.)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by NullNix

TTF is strictly less capable than OTF: converting it if the device you're using now can handle OTF is probably a bad idea, since if the font uses OTF-specific features and the renderer on your e-reader can use those features, you'll lose them. (OTF has a great many features that are not yet in wide use, but with the passage of time more of them will probably come into use.)

True that. But if that's not the case, then going TTF won't be an issue.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

True that. But if that's not the case, then going TTF won't be an issue.

True enuff. It's just that those of us who've spent decades trying to beat the community into using OTF whenever possible so that all its wonderful features can actually be *used* and we're not stuck in a 30-year-old archaic font format would rather people not encourage the use of obsolete and needlessly limiting formats unless there's actually a reason to use them rather than something more recent -- the only such reason I can think of being a need to render on horribly archaic rendering machinery that doesn't support OTF. Any such machinery is probably at least ten years out of date at this point (OTF support was added to FreeType almost twenty years ago), and doubtless contains so many long-known disastrous security holes that it *must* be updated unless you want any ebook containing a malicious publisher font to 0wn your machine and start buying books using your credit card

(There aren't seriously any e-readers out there that support uploading of your own fonts and/or book-embedded publisher fonts and do not support OTF, are there?!)

[rtiangha]

If you're looking for some free open-source fonts that were designed in mind for screens (though not necessarily eink displays specifically) rather than solely for print, the Readium project did some testing for their work and offer some suggestions. Many fonts that have been recommended multiple times in the past such as Bitter and Literata made their list. It's a good basis for suggestions, if you don't want to spend money on commercial fonts.

https://readium.org/readium-css/docs...bre_fonts.html

Note that in many instances, they'll link to the Google font page, but you may be able to get updated versions with more fixes or glyph support if you go directly to the font's project website and/or GitHub page. For example, Bitter's website (and its Google Fonts page) is serving an older version; the version found on their GitHub page is a couple of years newer and has added support for Cyrillic and Vietnamese.