Comments on: Yo, EPUB evangelists!

By: Arthur Attwell

Arthur Attwell — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 09:08:34 +0000

Yes, disclosure: the “5 minutes” claim applies each time we’re reusing CSS (on a relatively small set of tags) that took a lot longer to set up in the first place. And when you’re trying to do a lot of books in a short time, those 5 minutes can add up. Not worth it for every book.

(Thanks for your follow-up post to this too.)

By: MoJo

MoJo — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 01:19:03 +0000

I’m dubious of the “5 minutes” claim, but I’m eager to crack open your file and see what you did.

We know most reading software can and will ignore or override our design preferences

I know that they won’t ALWAYS, but for now I have to balance time and a device’s capability.

By: Arthur Attwell

Arthur Attwell — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 21:58:45 +0000

Hiya. We embed fonts all the time in our epubs (feel free to unpack and poke around inside the one here: http://bit.ly/2N0RVO — we used a lovely open font called Linux Libertine; open so that there were no licencing issues, and we didn’t have to encrypt/mangle the font in the epub package).

We know most reading software can and will ignore or override our design preferences, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put in the extra five minutes’ effort to make something look better for those who do use, say, ADE, or for when more and more ereaders come to properly support CSS.

By: MoJo

MoJo — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:00:58 +0000

I’m way more than willing to admit I’m wrong, and I’ll shout my menu of crow to the rooftops if I ever get it to work.

However, I will say that I really think that for anything beyond basic formatting courtesies such as full justification, line height, paragraph indent, chapter breaks, and ToC/hyperlinked content, a person who seeks out e-books cares more about content and ease of readability than pretty.

There is an additional issue: Reader preferences. There are (a) E-book readers that will override embedded fonts and (b) a reader who wants to change the font but can’t because that reader doesn’t override embedded fonts. In the first case, the time was wasted when the reader changes the fonts and such to his preference. In the second case, you risk making the reader mad because he can’t.

And EPUB files with embedded fonts are huge.

All that said, I was just sent a source file to examine and will this weekend. I WANT to be proven wrong.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:42:11 +0000

DE does support embedded fonts. I’ve gotten it working fine.