Kobo Font Help

[ewalk493]

Hi all,

I know this topic has been posted frequently. I've searched here and on Reddit and have tried the following techniques and still can't solve a variety of issues with a few specific fonts. In general, I am fine only having the regular and italic fonts on my Kobo.

The issues:

• Fonts show up as different fonts in the Kobo menu for bold, italics, and bold italics.

• After editing the font family name and other metadata using FontForge, I can get the fonts to show as a single family in the Kobo font menu but the fonts either display italics for everything OR the regular font is used but italic and bold do not display properly (i.e., the Kobo OS just slants the regular font.

Solutions I have tried:

• Renaming the font file itself, e.g. TestFont-Regular.ttf to Test Font-Regular.ttf

• Renaming the font name and font family in FontForge and re-generating a .ttf file

• Deleting the -Bold, -Italic, and -BoldItalic from the file names and adding b, i, and z instead.

At this point I think there are very specific issues with the fonts I am trying to use. The fonts giving me the most grief are listed below. I will also add posts to this thread with attached screenshots of the current file names and the metadata per FontForge. Some of these fonts are also freely available for use - so y'all might be able to download them directly and see if there is anything I am missing.

I know this is a recurring topic but I have referenced threads in this forum from 2024-2011 and have tried a lot of different solutions but none have worked so far.

Fonts:

• Leluja-Original from Omni-Bus Type (info attached to this post). I modified the actual file names and the font and font family names in FontForge, but after all that only the regular font works on my Kobo and italics do not display properly

• Uffizi from Latinotype; if I load all the files onto the Kobo they show up as 4 separate fonts. When I adjust the font and family names it shows as 1 font in the Kobo menu but italic and bold do not display properly (i.e., Kobo just slants the normal font.

• Test Heldane Text from Klim - I downloaded their sample fonts to see which ones I preferred before purchasing; most of them work fine, but Heldane does not; this one just displays italics 100% of the time.

• Reforma from Pampatype - this issues with this one are unique, I can load them fine onto the Kobo and they display fine in the font menu, but when I select the font, the text only appears as a Kobo default font

[ewalk493]

I should also add that I am posting the original font metadata in the FontForge screenshots. These are not my modified files because I just got frustrated and deleted them.

[Sirtel]

You may want to read this:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...play_Correctly

[ewalk493]

Yep - read it multiple times and tried all 3 solutions. The fonts I'm trying to use have Panose values of "Any" and the first two steps didn't help at all.

[ewalk493]

And here is the info for the Uffizi font. I think the issues are similar to the first font I posted, but I can't figure out if there is a specific name field/value that I need to change in FontForge to make it work properly.

[PeterT]

I can't say that I understand fully what I'm doing, but, I made use of shermanp's script ReadifyFont https://github.com/shermp/ReadifyFont and generated what I called 'LelujaNew', loaded it along with an epub called FontTester and seem to have no issues seeing 4 distinct styles and only a single font name LelujaNew.

I used the commands

fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -r LelujaOriginal-Regular.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -i LelujaOriginal-Italic.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -b LelujaOriginal-Bold.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -B LelujaOriginal-BoldItalic.ttf LelujaNew

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I can't say that I understand fully what I'm doing, but, I made use of shermanp's script ReadifyFont https://github.com/shermp/ReadifyFont and generated what I called 'LelujaNew', loaded it along with an epub called FontTester and seem to have no issues seeing 4 distinct styles and only a single font name LelujaNew.

I used the commands

fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -r LelujaOriginal-Regular.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -i LelujaOriginal-Italic.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -b LelujaOriginal-Bold.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -B LelujaOriginal-BoldItalic.ttf LelujaNew

I have no idea what the script is doing, but in Windows Font Viewer, the descenders are cut off. In the regular version, the letter o is screwed up. Here are the screen grabs to show the problems.

I think some of this this may have to do with the adding weight which a Kobo does not need. So the code for adding weight should be removed even if the adding of weight is not the problem.

[ewalk493]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I can't say that I understand fully what I'm doing, but, I made use of shermanp's script ReadifyFont https://github.com/shermp/ReadifyFont and generated what I called 'LelujaNew', loaded it along with an epub called FontTester and seem to have no issues seeing 4 distinct styles and only a single font name LelujaNew.

I used the commands

fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -r LelujaOriginal-Regular.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -i LelujaOriginal-Italic.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -b LelujaOriginal-Bold.ttf LelujaNew
fontforge -script ReadifyFontCLI.py -B LelujaOriginal-BoldItalic.ttf LelujaNew

Interesting! While this does help show the font as a single family in the Kobo font menu, when I select it for use, all text is displayed in Bold Italics haha.

One problem solved, another created!

[PeterT]

Try using the ePub in this post as a test.

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...2&postcount=21

I'm wondering if the issues you're having are related to the markup in the book itself?

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I'm wondering if the issues you're having are related to the markup in the book itself?

It's certainly possible. I bought a book that was formatted as one giant chapter, and the heading on the first page was missing a closing tag, so the entire book was displayed in bold.