ePub custom Fonts on all Sonys

[kado]

My mistake, it must read more than 1,500,000 in lieu of 150,000.

Even more WOWW!!!

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by kado

My mistake, it must read more than 1,500,000 in lieu of 150,000.

Even more WOWW!!!

No. The more karma you have the more you are allowed to give. I certainly have not answered 1.5 million queries.

[kado]

I have never ever felt that much worthless and tiny in my life with my dinky 2 karma points...

Sorry for not being able to contribute to your angel rank more. But at least I have managed to put my 2 points several times. Good for you!!! You badly needed them...

[Timur]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

... For instance, the PRST1's version of Amasis font does show Turkish chars but the NookSTR's version of Amasis does not. ...

This made me curious and try all the fonts on my Nook STR. All 6 of them (Caecilia, Malabar, Amasis, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Trebuchet) support Turkish characters. Maybe the Amasis you have tried is not really identical to the one in Nook STR.

You can get all the font files that are on Nook STR by downloading the standalone firmware update package from Nook Support pages on B&N website. It is a zip file and the fonts are under /system/fonts directory.

[JSWolf]

Which version of Amasis is better (T1 or nook)?

[jackie_w]

@Timur,

Re: Nook Amasis - that's very interesting and somewhat perplexing, because that's exactly how I did acquire the Nook fonts to try out on my Sonys. Admittedly it was a few weeks ago.

Nook Amasis Regular font is called Amasis30.ttf sized 83,420 bytes
PRST1 Amasis Regular font is called AmasisMTW1G.otf sized 122,660 bytes

The Nook Amasis shows most of the Turkish chars, but not all, when used on my Sony. The PRST1 Amasis shows all of them. See attached screencaps, 1st is Nook, 2nd is PRST1. The same epub on the same PRS650 reader was used for both screencaps.

Which version of Amasis is better (T1 or nook)?

@JSWolf,
That would depends on your point-of-view. Based on visual clarity I'd say Nook Amasis because it's a heavier font (like a semi-bold) -- presumably that '30' in the filename is describing font-weight. However, if you need non-English char support then the T1 is probably more versatile.

IMO the Amasis font is rather nice. Amasis Regular has the benefits of the Kindle Caecilia fonts (clear, plain, simple) with the added benefits (again IMO) that Amasis Italic is more elegant than Kindle Caecilia Italic and Amasis has a bigger difference between bold and non-bold.

[Timur]

I see the reason for the discrepancy now, your Amasis is from 1.0.1 update package, mine is from 1.1 update package. These are the file sizes from 1.1:

220,280 Amasis30.ttf
234,924 Amasis30-Bold.ttf
259,544 Amasis30-BoldItalic.ttf
263,936 Amasis30-Italic.ttf

Coincidentally, although the font files in 1.0.1 update seem to be missing Turkish glyphs, I have used 1.0.1 for a long time and I remember checking Turkish characters with all fonts and found them working then as well. Maybe 1.0 firmware had the bigger files anyway and the updater was not really copying those font files from 1.0.1 during update.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Timur

I see the reason for the discrepancy now, your Amasis is from 1.0.1 update package, mine is from 1.1 update package. These are the file sizes from 1.1:

220,280 Amasis30.ttf
234,924 Amasis30-Bold.ttf
259,544 Amasis30-BoldItalic.ttf
263,936 Amasis30-Italic.ttf

Coincidentally, although the font files in 1.0.1 update seem to be missing Turkish glyphs, I have used 1.0.1 for a long time and I remember checking Turkish characters with all fonts and found them working then as well. Maybe 1.0 firmware had the bigger files anyway and the updater was not really copying those font files from 1.0.1 during update.

Thanks for clearing that up, Timur. I'm off to re-download the newer, better version. Thanks

[kado]

Originally Posted by Timur

This made me curious and try all the fonts on my Nook STR. All 6 of them (Caecilia, Malabar, Amasis, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Trebuchet) support Turkish characters. Maybe the Amasis you have tried is not really identical to the one in Nook STR.

You can get all the font files that are on Nook STR by downloading the standalone firmware update package from Nook Support pages on B&N website. It is a zip file and the fonts are under /system/fonts directory.

That's exactly what I have been after Timur.

Thanks a lot, very much appreciated...

[jackie_w]

Follow-up ... after downloading Nook Amasis from Nook update v1.1

The results are mixed. The Turkish chars are now displayed correctly with the v1.1 Amasis. However, despite the filenames remaining the same (Amasis30...) I see that the font-weight of v1.1 is not as heavy as it was in v1.0.1.

I would say the Nook v1.1 Amasis looks more like the PRST1 Amasis, but the fact that the Nook font files are twice the size of the PRST1 font files may mean that the Nook is 'better' in some way. I don't know enough about how fonts work to draw conclusions.

For anyone interested in a comparative visual overview from a Windows PC, the 3 versions are, from left to right, Nookv1.0.1, Nookv1.1, PRST1.
(I hope I'm not breaking any copyright protocol)

[Timur]

Although the new files are named "Amasis30", they are not Amasis30 but regular Amasis(different weight). One can tell from fontname property embedded in the files.

Couple of comparisons between 81kB and 215kB Amasis follows in the attachment:

[jackie_w]

... and just to complete the comparison, the PRST1 equivalent of Timur's Nook font properties...

[Phil_C]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

@notsure

Try this:

Reimport the original epub, i.e. before you did any conversions.

Convert using all the ExtraCSS you had before, but replace

body {
  font-family: "Fontin", serif;
}

with

body.calibre {
  font-family: "Fontin", serif;
}

I'm having a similar problem where i can't get the specified fonts in Extra CSS to work.

This is probably because of the html output by Book Designer. The converted epub always retains the original font, in this case GeorgiaEInk15.

There is no simple <body> tag in this original html file, and I can't find a similar way to make the Extra CSS work. You can see in this snippet of html that there is a single line that begins with "<body" followed by several other items including the font-family. A single "</body>" tag appears at the end of the book.

So I'd like to know if there is a way to replace:

body {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
 }

with something that will work.

Original html snippet:

---
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Unknown</title>
    <meta content="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
  
</head>
  <body bgcolor="#ffffff" style="FONT-WEIGHT:normal; FONT-SIZE:small; MARGIN-BOTTOM:245px; LINE-HEIGHT:normal; FONT-FAMILY:GeorgiaEInk15" text="#000000">
<h2 align="center" id="BookTitle"><font color="#b90000"><b>BOOK TITLE</b></font> 
</h2>
<div align="justify">    </div>
<div align="center"><b>BOOK TITLE #1</b></div>
<div align="justify">    </div>
<div align="justify">    </div>
<div align="center">by</div>
<div align="justify">    </div>
<div align="justify">    </div>
<h2 align="center" id="BookAuthor"><font color="#ff0000"><b>JOHN SMITH</b></font> 
</h2>

Yes, I can run the Calibre conversion and then use Tweak Book to manually change the font name in stylesheet.css, but that is cumbersome and the tweaked epub file retains the original (now incorrect) font name in a zillion places.

[jackie_w]

@Phil_C,
Can you be a bit more specific? Which ereader are you trying to create the epub for (PRS300? PRS350? PRST1?) Where on your reader are the Amasis fonts you want to use?

In that html file the <body> tag is

<body bgcolor="#ffffff" style="FONT-WEIGHT:normal; FONT-SIZE:small; MARGIN-BOTTOM:245px; LINE-HEIGHT:normal; FONT-FAMILY:GeorgiaEInk15" text="#000000">

Is this the only place in the html file where font-family GeorgiaEInk15 is referenced? Or is it coded into every paragraph?

What have you been entering, if anything, in the Calibre Look&Feel ExtraCSS box in your zip-to-epub conversions?

To give a more helpful response, the answers to these questions are necessary.

[Phil_C]

@jackie_w

This for a PRS-350.
The Amasis fonts are in the proper folder on the Reader. Extra CSS is:

@font-face {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
 font-weight: normal;
 font-style: normal;
 src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Amasis-MT.ttf);
}
@font-face {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
 font-weight: bold;
 font-style: normal;
 src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Amasis-MT-Bold.ttf);
}
@font-face {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
 font-weight: normal;
 font-style: italic;
 src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Amasis-MT-Italic.ttf);
}
@font-face {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
 font-weight: bold;
 font-style: italic;
 src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Amasis-MT-Bold-Italic.ttf);
}
body {
 font-family: AmasisMT;
}

The only other things I use in Look & Feel are line height, base font size, and font size key. Those work fine.

Yes, the GeorgiaEInk15 is referenced only once in the html (zip) file.

I just found that I can use Search & Replace during the Calibre conversion to change that one instance of the font name. The book seems to look OK. I'll have to take a closer look. An added step that I'd like to eliminate, though.

(BTW, you got me on the right track in another recent thread regarding RegEx and TOCs. I since have expanded and refined the expressions to do even more. Thanks!)