How to determine which CSS lines are specifying a font?

[Kreeblah]

I have a book that was pretty terribly set up by the publisher, and I've had to fix some of the CSS in it. However, I'm having trouble with getting Calibre to recognize the fonts for it. It came with all of the font files it was supposed to, but two of them were referenced incorrectly in the stylesheet and also had invalid properties in the actual font files (they were bold fonts but not actually self-identifying as bold). So, I pulled the fonts out, added them to a directory where Calibre can find them, and attempted to polish the book to embed them.

The problem is, Calibre seems to be insisting that the stylesheet is specifying different properties than one of the fonts has, even though I can't find those properties anywhere in the stylesheet. Specifically, what I'm seeing is this:

Could not find a font in the "NewsGoth BdXCn BT" family exactly matching the CSS font specification, will embed a fallback font instead. CSS font specification:

• font-weight: 700
• font-style: normal
• font-stretch: normal

Matched font specification: /Users/myuser/.fonts/News Gothic Bold Extra Condensed BT.ttf

• font-weight: bold
• font-style: normal
• font-stretch: condensed

Meanwhile, I have nothing in the stylesheet specifying a numeric weight for the font (only "bold"), and each reference to this font has font-stretch listed as "condensed", so I don't know where "normal" is coming from. There's only one stylesheet in the book and I've done a bunch of grepping through the book's files to see if I'm missing anything anywhere else, but I'm coming up with nothing. Additionally, running Calibre in debug mode just prints the same information to the console.

Is there a way to determine what lines Calibre is using to compose the font specification? If not, how can I figure out what I'm missing here? I'm running Calibre 7.12 on macOS 14.5, if it's relevant.

[theducks]

bold is the old way (and older readers want that as well as EPUB2 )

the numbers are the newer way of specifying font-weight (I have seen a chart. there are more number levels than the old)
Each font has an internal table (normal, bold, italic, bold-italic). That is 4 font files to make up the complete FAMILY (not al faces have all 4, so substitutes are sometimes called out and the check will complain that the names do not match the Family

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by Kreeblah

So, I pulled the fonts out, added them to a directory where Calibre can find them, and attempted to polish the book to embed them.

How did you do this?
Did you hack the epub and manually add files to it or did you use the Calibre Editor and select Add/Import new files?

You could also install a font program, like Sourceforge and check what is specified in the font file.

[lomkiri]

Originally Posted by Kreeblah

Is there a way to determine what lines Calibre is using to compose the font specification?

Menu View / Live CSS,
Then, click anywhere in the text you want to analyze (in the edition window, not in the preview)

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by lomkiri

Menu View / Live CSS,
Then, click anywhere in the text you want to analyze (in the edition window, not in the preview)

You beat me to it, Live CSS is one of the calibre-editor's best features, alongside multi-lingual spell checking.

BR

[Kreeblah]

Originally Posted by theducks

bold is the old way (and older readers want that as well as EPUB2 )

the numbers are the newer way of specifying font-weight (I have seen a chart. there are more number levels than the old)
Each font has an internal table (normal, bold, italic, bold-italic). That is 4 font files to make up the complete FAMILY (not al faces have all 4, so substitutes are sometimes called out and the check will complain that the names do not match the Family

Ah, good to know. I knew that the labels mapped to numbers (and that 700 and bold were equivalent), but I was confused about where it was getting the specifically numeric value from. Maybe Calibre just converts the text labels to numeric values, though, if that's the newer standard.

Originally Posted by Karellen

How did you do this?
Did you hack the epub and manually add files to it or did you use the Calibre Editor and select Add/Import new files?

You could also install a font program, like Sourceforge and check what is specified in the font file.

I unzipped the epub and copied the font files to ~/.fonts, removed them from the directory tree, the references from the manifest, and the locations to the font files from the stylesheet (plus fixed up the font names in the stylesheet based on the internal font names), then used the Polish Books function to embed them.

I've been using FontForge to check things with fonts in order to do things like get the font family name (because it was very wrong in the stylesheet originally for this font; it was listed as the font filename rather than the font family name). I've also been able to inspect other relevant properties with it, too (see the attachment for a screenshot).

Originally Posted by lomkiri

Menu View / Live CSS,
Then, click anywhere in the text you want to analyze (in the edition window, not in the preview)

That's good to know, but it would really help if I knew where the problem text is in the book in order to inspect that to see what's going on. That's the issue, though. I don't know where the book is calling for a style that comes out as what Calibre is determining is different than the actual font since the polish books function doesn't really report much other than that something didn't match somewhere. Something must be overriding some of the CSS somewhere, but it'd be helpful if Calibre could tell me where the mismatched font is being used.

If that's not currently an option, though, this should be able to get me the info I need. It'll just take me a while to find where every use of every relevant element is.

[Kreeblah]

Hmmm. Doesn't seem like I can edit posts, so I guess I need to make a new reply?

But, I just used that Live CSS tool and went through every element in the book that uses one of the classes that references the font I'm having issues with, and every computed style came up with a font-weight of 700 and a font-stretch of 75%. I'm absolutely mystified as to where that mismatch is coming from.

Is there anything else I can try to track this down?

[theducks]

font-stretch?

FWIW My Kobo's don't like some valid CSS being used: letter-spacing causes words to run together. eg ChapterTitle

IMHO K.I.S.S. (an least for some things)

?? Isn't Live CSS a temporary (that session) operation??

I use the 'Inspector' to try and decode the CSS nesting.

Right click on a / the problem paragraph (in the Preview pane): Inspect element

[Karellen]

Why don't you post the book here. Maybe someone will spot the issue.
If the book is in copyright, remember to scramble it first.