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Old 04-21-2013, 04:19 AM   #1
roycymru
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italicisation issues still in 2.5
Hi. On my Glo I still have some issues with italicised fonts displaying as bold rather than italics. Seems to affect Avenir Next, Kobo Nickel and Gill Sans. Which I think is an improvement on 2.4, so a step in the right direction , and therefore will hopefully be fully resolved in the next release. I have a couple of follow on questions:

I believe others say this is not an issue with kepub.epub files and is only an issue with epub files? Can anyone confirm? (It should work with either).

Secondly, I think I read somewhere the renaming the file extension of an epub file to kepub.epub instead would mean the file is treated by the kobo as an kepub.epub. Is this correct? If so, does this mean that italicised text would displayed correctly if I renamed my epub files?

Thank you
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Old 04-21-2013, 02:04 PM   #2
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Quote:
Originally Posted by roycymru View Post
Hi. On my Glo I still have some issues with italicised fonts displaying as bold rather than italics. Seems to affect Avenir Next, Kobo Nickel and Gill Sans. Which I think is an improvement on 2.4, so a step in the right direction , and therefore will hopefully be fully resolved in the next release. I have a couple of follow on questions:

I believe others say this is not an issue with kepub.epub files and is only an issue with epub files? Can anyone confirm? (It should work with either).

Secondly, I think I read somewhere the renaming the file extension of an epub file to kepub.epub instead would mean the file is treated by the kobo as an kepub.epub. Is this correct? If so, does this mean that italicised text would displayed correctly if I renamed my epub files?

Thank you
On my Glo, after copying and renaming the font tester file to .kepub.epub, italics and oblique work for Avenir Next, Gill Sans and Kobo Nickel. Switching to the .epub copy, the italics show as bold and oblique shows as normal text. Actually, using .epub, I haven't found a font that displays oblique without requiring an oblique variant. Personally, since all three of those fonts have diacritical support issues, I'm sticking with Charis SIL for now.

Avenir Next: The only macron character displayed is the OE ligature which displays without the macron, none of the breve characters display.

Gill Sans: same as Avenir Next though the boxes are blank rather than filled with a question mark.

Kobo Nickel: Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu show up with macrons, OEoe shows up but without the macron, Aa, Gg and Uu show up with breves. Best of the lot.

Charis SIL: All diacritical characters in the test set show up properly. All the fractions shows up. One of the ligatures are missing but then I haven't found any fonts with support for the fj ligature.

Regards,
David
Last edited by DNSB; 04-22-2013 at 05:38 PM.
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Old 04-21-2013, 04:22 PM   #3
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I emailed Kobo support about these problems on 2.4.0. Their stance was that they only support the official fonts on kepubs, so they were not going to fix this problem on epubs.

I also had the problem with some side loaded fonts on epubs, which can be fixed by making sure you use the correct font files names and names in the font files.
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Old 04-22-2013, 10:35 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ShellShock View Post
I emailed Kobo support about these problems on 2.4.0. Their stance was that they only support the official fonts on kepubs, so they were not going to fix this problem on epubs.

I also had the problem with some side loaded fonts on epubs, which can be fixed by making sure you use the correct font files names and names in the font files.
See here.

So Kobo's font naming isn't correct. They probably changed some font names or font name styles but forgot to rename the IDs too. While this problem is so easy to fix. Customers are a pain in the a**.
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Old 04-22-2013, 02:09 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ShellShock View Post
I emailed Kobo support about these problems on 2.4.0. Their stance was that they only support the official fonts on kepubs, so they were not going to fix this problem on epubs.

I also had the problem with some side loaded fonts on epubs, which can be fixed by making sure you use the correct font files names and names in the font files.
That is ridiculous. the official spec says it supports epub not kepub.epub, so really it should be the other way around! Sounds like a cop out by kobo, it can't be that difficult to fix? If I remember correctly is this not something they broke anyway and worked in earlier versions of the firmware?
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Old 04-22-2013, 03:25 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB View Post
On my Glo, after copying and renaming the font tester file to .kepub.epub, italics and oblique work for Avenir Next, Gill Sans and Kobo Nickel. Switching to the .epub copy, the italics show as bold and oblique shows as normal text. Actually, using .epub, I haven't found a font that displays oblique without requiring an oblique variant. Personally, since all three of those fonts have diacritical support issues, I'm sticking with Charis SIL for now.

Avenir Next: The only macron character displayed is the OE ligature which displays without the macron, none of the breve characters display.

Gill Sans: same as Avenir Next though the boxes are blank rather than filled with a question mark.

Kobo Nickel: Aa, Ed, Ii, Oo, Uu show up with macrons, OEoe shows up but without the macron, Aa, Gg and Uu show up with breves. Best of the lot.

Charis SIL: All diacritical characters in the test set show up properly. All the fractions shows up. One of the ligatures are missing but then I haven't found any fonts with support for the fj ligature.

Regards,
David
Thanks for your reply David. Excuse my ignorance, but I think I am missing something. I thought by just by renaming a .epub book file to .kepub.epub and then sending this file to the Kobo it would magically display any Kobo Nickel italicised text as italics not bold. This is obviously a naievity on my part.

However your reference to font tester does imply that somehow it is possible to display italicised text correctly in .epub books on the Kobo, using the Kobo Nickel font. Or am I again wrong? If this is possible, can you please explain in detail how to do this, as Kobo Nickel is my favourite font.

Thank you
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Old 04-22-2013, 05:51 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by roycymru View Post
Thanks for your reply David. Excuse my ignorance, but I think I am missing something. I thought by just by renaming a .epub book file to .kepub.epub and then sending this file to the Kobo it would magically display any Kobo Nickel italicised text as italics not bold. This is obviously a naievity on my part.

However your reference to font tester does imply that somehow it is possible to display italicised text correctly in .epub books on the Kobo, using the Kobo Nickel font. Or am I again wrong? If this is possible, can you please explain in detail how to do this, as Kobo Nickel is my favourite font.

Thank you
My preferred font for my Glo is JSWolf's modified version of Charis SIL. I find that font very readable and it has excellent diacritical and other special character support. It also offered a darker type which I found useful in poorer lighting.

As for italic support, ever since Kobo went to obfuscated fonts, Adobe's Reader Mobile used for rendering .epubs has had issues with some fonts. Since the font obfuscation uses Adobe's technology, I'm not sure whether to blame Kobo, Adobe or simply to scream "a plague on both your houses!".

While you can simply rename a .epub to .kepub.epub to use the Kobo renderer, you will need to make some other changes such as adding the cover-property directive unless you like see all covers displayed as a dot. Since I've done this with relatively few files, I've made the changes manually. There is a Calibre plugin by jgoguen which will make the changes for you when the books are copied to your Kobo in cooperation with the Kobo driver.

I've only recommended the renaming for test purposes so you can get a quick and dirty look at the differences between the handling of .epub and .kepub.epub. When I was looking at the differences between the two renderers, I simply modified my test file and now have a .epub and .kepub.epub version on my Kobo.

The font tester is a simple epub file I created to allow me to see the various styles/weights/special characters without having to search for them. A variant with added support for testing various languages and images is also kicking around -- DomesticExtremis is the creator.

Regards,
David
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Old 05-02-2013, 07:07 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB View Post
My preferred font for my Glo is JSWolf's modified version of Charis SIL. I find that font very readable and it has excellent diacritical and other special character support. It also offered a darker type which I found useful in poorer lighting.
Hi mate,
Quite fond of Charis SIL myself. Can you tell me where I'll find the modified version please? Many thanks!
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Old 05-02-2013, 07:25 AM   #9
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Check this thread for lots of fonts. Summary of Modified Fonts
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Old 05-02-2013, 07:51 AM   #10
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Ooh, great thread, Peter! Thanks!


(Last two links go to threads whose attachments have been removed, but the others are still worth having. Appreciated.)
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