Dealing with no transparency

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What site(s) allow you to convert your images to fonts?

The post does write "site". There are desktop tools to make fonts. I never heard of a website that does it.
It's like making your own Wing Ding / Ding Bat font.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Then Amazon, which has over 90% of English language ebook sales will not accept it.

You don't need to obfuscate if DRM is applied.

So, if you are just offering the EPUB for free with no DRM, you have to obfuscate the font to "protect" it. Otherwise, leave the font alone and let the DRM "protect" it.

We all know that neither DRM nor obfuscation keep the font from being copied from the EPUB file, but as long as you do one of those, you have followed the license that Adobe requires.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

That might help with Amazon/Kindle but doesn't the user have to enable embedded fonts to see them?

I've never had to enable "Publisher" to see embedded fonts that are not trying to replace the main reading font. Perhaps this was true with older firmware.

Is it more work to make a custom glyph in a custom font than to make the background transparent in an image??

It depends.

I use HighLogic FontCreator, which allows you to paste any clipboard image into the glyph as "background". It's not really part of the glyph, but can be used to help you draw what you want. Once you paste, though, there is a "trace outlines" command that will draw the lines for you. After that, you just export as an OTF file (FontCreator uses its own project file format so that it can keep extra bits like the backgrounds). Paste/trace on 20 glyphs will take about 10 minutes.

LTC Fleurons is a good commercial font.
Fontspace has a reasonable selection of fleuron fonts, some completely free to use.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What site(s) allow you to convert your images to fonts?

I use HighLogic FontCreator software, but if you want free software, you can use Inkscape to convert a bitmap into outlines, then copy the outlines and paste into FontForge.