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. 
That’s—bizarre.
And annoying.
And annoys me about Adobe. Something about 800 lb gorillas…and a conscious corporate decision toward its customers and an attitude I don’t find attractive.
A round of applause for Jane, the clever and conscientious!
Sorry if that sound sarcastic, that’s not how I mean it. I genuinely admire your cleverness in managing to track down all these almost ungraspable details to get the results you want from these difficult and opaque programs; and then make sure it works for all the different circumstances in which people read your books (formats and readers). Your attention to detail is phenomenal, as is your tenacity in pursuing your goal, and it certainly enhances our reading experience.
I’m so glad my PayPal problems got sorted out just in time for Alizant, I’m really looking forward to reading it this weekend!
“For a company to take this kind of stand, to deliberately deviate from the maximum compatibility is, IMO, arrogant.”
Agreed, but that’s Adobe all over. And deliberate deviation from maximum (or even any) compatibility by pretty much all the big players is what makes the ePub non-standard such a disaster in practice.
The silly thing is, epub is a great format. It’s by far the most flexible. Basically, it’s just html, so anything you could put on the internet, you can display in a book. It’s the readers, both software and hardware, that are attitudinal.
I’ve just thrown my hands up on most formats and become content with something that’s readable. I can’t get at any of them to make them prettier once Calibre has done it’s thing. Oh…RTF. I clean that up a bit.
The thing is, Epub lets me do just about anything…Mobi/prc is good as well, but there’s no way to embed the fonts in the file. If they’re on the machine (computer) they’ll display, but that’s a little too much like the internet.
Ah, well…still early times
Actually I think a good half of the current mess is that ePub is too much like the Internet, more precisely the early days of the Web, when every version of every Web browser seemed to implement a different set of extensions and interpret the HTML standard in different ways. (The other half, of course, is the mix of incompatible DRM formats floating around, since display is moot if your hard/software can’t even open the file, but that’s a separate rant).
That’s one reason CC is DRM freeeeee!
But you’re right…standardization w/b reeeeeeally nice. When I say I prefer it, it’s because of the inherent flexibility it allows me as a book designer. I’ve no stake in it other than that, fer sure.
Oh, absolutely – from a design PoV, HTML-in-a-zip-file is great. For your sanity’s sake, however, I’d suggest keeping the 90/10 rule in mind when trying fancy formatting tricks (90% of your markup – all the boring bits – will display exactly as intended in 90% of all clients; the 10% you sweat blood over trying get it just so will only display as intended in 10% of all clients…).
In a .pdf, if you don’t have the font embedded, it substitutes a system font, unless it can download an appropriate font. At least, that’s my understanding. The substitution should respect italics, bold, bold+italics in its substitution. If they didn’t make the ebook that way … well, it’s a design oversight in their application, or whatever application generates the ebook.
I’ve embedded the fonts in the epub as well. It’s just that most (free) fancy fonts don’t include special alphabets for the ital and bold, they just count on the computer to make adjustments in angle and width.
ADE will respect the italics…if there’s an italics version of the font included in the file. If there isn’t, it defaults to the italic of the default font for the file or reader. IMO, it should default to the embedded font plain rather than the default italic, since that special font is what the creator worked so hard to get in there. Every other reader (4) I’ve tested just does the “okay, let’s just cant the non-ital font a bit and make it look different.” But not ADE.
What I really wish is that I could find a good font creating/manipulating program so I could “up” the default size of the scripts I use so I didn’t have to change font size. Some of you will see the “script” sections a bit larger than the rest as well as in Italics.
Bottom line, we just aren’t there yet. I’ll just do my best! :D
You may have noticed that the font purists all agree that you can’t create an italic font simply by slanting a regular one… and considering that Adobe used to make a ton of money selling/licensing fonts (I even bought a few) — I’m sure they would like to have you think of them as purists (especially if they can license a few more fonts that way!)
On the other hand, at 200 or less dpi and 10 or 12 point, it’s pretty hard to see the difference!
BTW, which other epub readers do you test with? I can use FB2 and coolreader (if I upgrade my Pocket EZ reader). I guess IPodTouch or Ipad are both different, but I don’t have either :(
We NEED some epub conformance tests!
Now I’ve gotta go read the rest of ROL before you get this one done…
My hero!
All I can test on are the readers for the computer, i.e. ADE, Calibre, firefox reader…that sort of thing.
I can understand the font purists’ point, honestly I can. My point is that that’s an aesthetic decision the creators of the product s/b allowed to make, not the person making the reader.
And I think you make a very good point…Adobe has more economic than aesthetic reasons for the decision. :D
But I’ve got my answer, so I don’t care. :D
Ohhh -why, thank you…
I just want to see the books on time and looking the way you want them to.
By that I mean start with Rings of Lightning and going on to all the rest — before the weekend?!
Font purist that I am (somewhat), this is clearly a case of a missing error message on Adobe’s part, “Italic not available: substituting Ugly Roman and Ugly Italic,” or whatever the case is.
When I read space opera or other books with ship names, I reformat into Garamond, which has a beautiful Italic, full of swooping descenders. And Georgia is good for numbers: it has the old style numbers with ascenders and descenders, though the three is a big tame. I like the angled top and a descender of a “Banker’s three,” similar to an ezh, Ʒ, but with the descender pointed more. (“Banker’s” because it can’t be altered into an 8.) I think Georgia is Windows-standard, but I’m unsure of the provenance of my Garamond fonts.
Oooo….that IS pwettty! (Noting Garamond…) I’ve tended to use Georgia in my pdf’s but I might switch.
In all honesty, I’m not a fan of the forced italics, and I’m really glad to have the coding option pholy found for me, which does what I really want, which is to display the font as created, if embedded fonts are supported, and to default to the generic “serif” font if not.
I just wish there was a place to go to get all these little “undocumented features” warnings. (There probably is, but I wasn’t able to find anything…but I admit, I’m the worst at finding things on the internet. I get bored…really fast.
Usually, I just whine to Carolyn and she can find it for me.
For ebook probs, I just whine to the folks at Mobileread. Don’t know what I’d do without them!
You might be interested in http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx (Further comments delayed to fox the URL sniffer.)
Walt, that wasn’t very nice of you; throwing such an interesting link in where I’m just trying to catch up on my blog reading
It’s going to take me hours to follow even just some of the links that link leads to…
Ah, the joys of being retired; to follow your nose…
PS – I’m not sure Garamond is really free for embedding in epubs – I’ll have to track it down. But I think it’s older than M$…
“PS – I’m not sure Garamond is really free for embedding in epubs – I’ll have to track it down. But I think it’s older than M$…”
Definitely, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond
But, M$ owns the copyright on the version of the font in Office, I strongly expect. And the same doubtless applies to WordPerfect. Open Office? I don’t know.
The provenance of Garamond is M$ Office, common, but not ubiquitous:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837463
In Garamond, try the Joint Whatever Ship, JWS Quizzically! I almost want to invent a story just to go with the beautiful typography.