of Adobe Digital Editions, one of the more widely used epub readers. It won’t create italics by simply canting the font. If you embed a font which doesn’t specifically have an ital version… it defaults the font to one that does. Tracking this little gem just cost me two solid days. Other epub readers have no problem doing this, but not ADE.
I believe from scuttle I’ve now heard on the internet that this is a conscious decision on Adobe’s part, not a problem inherent to the program, and brings up an interesting question: does an ebook reader have the right to make such a determination on the aesthetics of a book? I say, no. That’s the creator’s decision. An ebook reader’s job is to do its damnedest to present the file it’s given. Period. For a company to take this kind of stand, to deliberately deviate from the maximum compatibility is, IMO, arrogant.
I’m trying to create a document that will read nicely in many different readers, not all of which support embedded fonts. Therefore, when I put in a section that is handwritten, I want a default font to show in italics, so what I did was use an upright handwritten font and surround it with italics. That way, the handwriting looked fine and if it was defaulted, it would still be in ital to set it apart.
Unfortunately, ADE defaulted this combo of code to the default font. Adding to the problem, sigil seemed to randomly (I’m sure it was triggered, but it appeared random) insert its own ital code, which had to be carefully tracked down and eliminated. Tracking this problem down involved hours of changing one thing in the epub file, saving, bringing it up in ADE to see if anything changed, then deleting it from ADE and starting all over. I posed a question on Mobileread and one of the darlings finally found an answer, as I narrowed the problem down. Once we’d solved it, someone else came on and explained that ADE doesn’t create ital…which I’d kind of already figured, but it was really nice to have confirmation.
Granted, I should have just let it go and put in simple ital, but by that time it had become a mystery to solve. In the end, the solution is more elegant and more easily adapted to other formats, but I still think ADE should have such an idiosyncracy clearly documented, with suggested workarounds.
Anyway…that was my weekend. 
) A sequel involving Alizant’s machines was always “in the plan”, but after I finished Ring of Destiny, I really wanted to get back into my SF universe. By that time I’d gotten the rights to the original GroundTies Series back from Warner, whose SF line had pretty much gone down by the stern anyway. I also wanted to write a book on spec for the first time since my first novel to try to get some real feedback on my writing from new editors who weren’t already committed to a series. I felt my books still weren’t as “accessible” as they could be, even without compromising my own style.
