How to embed fonts in ePub after Calibre

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by frabjous

I don't really understand putting multiple family names in the @font-face declaration. This makes sense when you're using the fonts: you want a stack so that it moves down to a fallback if need be, but in the font-face, all this can do is screw up the fallbacks, right?

It can presumably screw up the fallback if there is something wrong with the font. The reason for doing it is that the fallback (the default serif font) isn't very good. By redefining serif you always get Liberation when no font is specified in the body of the ebook. This should not be necessary if the ePub was designed from the start to use an embedded font, but if it is added later it can be hard to get Liberation to to applied uniformly to all the CSS.

[elanamig]

Hello,

I'm a newbie on this forum.

I am trying to get cyrillic to display in epub. I used Calibre to create an epub file. The file displays Cyrillic in Calibre without problems.

Now I am trying to use Sigil to embed the fonts. I've added the liberation fonts to the epub file and modified the css. Saved epub.

Now, when I try to open it in Adobe Digital Editions, the ToC on the left displays in Cyrillic, but the text itself is ????????????....

I suspect I need to add or change something else, but what?

Thank you!

[elanamig]

Originally Posted by elanamig

Hello,

I'm a newbie on this forum.

I am trying to get cyrillic to display in epub. I used Calibre to create an epub file. The file displays Cyrillic in Calibre without problems.

Now I am trying to use Sigil to embed the fonts. I've added the liberation fonts to the epub file and modified the css. Saved epub.

Now, when I try to open it in Adobe Digital Editions, the ToC on the left displays in Cyrillic, but the text itself is ????????????....

I suspect I need to add or change something else, but what?

Thank you!

After spending days trying to figure it out, I got it 10 mins after I made the post. I had to go back to the css file and change every reference in the .calibreX block from Times New Roman serif to Liberation sans-serif...

Works, PHEW

[Danger]

Well I've been through this again and again. I cannot get embedded Italicized fonts to work no matter what I try. Figured at first something must be screwed with the Charis font files I was working with so I tried the Liberation fonts instead... same result. The regular font works when embedded but I cannot bold or italicize any words. If I remove the embedded font names from the CSS everything shows up as it should. If it matters I have been using Sigil to go the editting.

[wannabee]

Originally Posted by Valloric

If the mimetype file is not the first file and/or is not uncompressed, your epub might not work in all epub-supporting software. Calibre, ADE and Sigil can still handle this, but your epub is still non-conformant and may not work elsewhere.

I usually work from a mac but had to start a new job using a pc in a new job. I am so glad i did. My new books were all ok with epub check and crew flight.

All were unzipped for editing and zipped back up in windows 7 with a right mouse click. The original epubs were generated from indesign epubs. I have never had a problem. No scripts. I knew that the mimetype file was not to be compressed but they just worked.

[JaneFancher]

Originally Posted by Danger

Well I've been through this again and again. I cannot get embedded Italicized fonts to work no matter what I try. Figured at first something must be screwed with the Charis font files I was working with so I tried the Liberation fonts instead... same result. The regular font works when embedded but I cannot bold or italicize any words. If I remove the embedded font names from the CSS everything shows up as it should. If it matters I have been using Sigil to go the editting.

Total sympathy!

I'm no expert and I don't know that this will fix your problem, but if you're going from a Calibre created epub file and editing it in Sigil, you might have an extraneous code that looks like this

p.sgc-1 {font-style: italic}

in your Sigil html. This will be at the head of every file that contains italics and be reflected in a style call around the italicized words themselves.

This actually duplicates the ital CSS code put in by Calibre and seems to screw up the embeded font when viewed in some readers. I found I had to take out all references to this sgc code and then my font ital worked fine.

good luck!

[lavomat]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11045564/VEGESIGNES%20INCL.zip
This is my own built Font. I made an ePub eBook last week and I was questioning myself if I could embed these characters into it afterwards. VEGESIGNES English is the Title.[pirate site]

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Danger

Well I've been through this again and again. I cannot get embedded Italicized fonts to work no matter what I try. Figured at first something must be screwed with the Charis font files I was working with so I tried the Liberation fonts instead... same result. The regular font works when embedded but I cannot bold or italicize any words. If I remove the embedded font names from the CSS everything shows up as it should. If it matters I have been using Sigil to go the editting.

How were you viewing the EPUB when you decided it wasn't working? I'm not sure about Sigil, but if you try to view an EPUB with embedded fonts in the Calibre Viewer then bold & italic do not display correctly. The same EPUB viewed on my Sony readers displays just fine. I raised a Calibre bug ticket about it and was told it is a known fault. The exact response was:

This is caused by a bug in QtWebKit, see https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29433

I believe that QtWebKit is the cross platform tool kit by Nokia that Calibre uses for various things like the GUI.

In other words fixing it is not possible by the Calibre developers. If Sigil also uses the QtWebKit it will not be fixable by the Sigil developer(s) either. They will be reliant on Nokia fixing it.

[artshim]

Originally Posted by P.T

I created a simple plugin for Calibre that embeds fonts into epub as a part of the conversion process.

Any feedback is welcome.

P.T,

I put some additional code for some more flexibility. Below are usage,

* To use proper font, the resources folder need to be populated with following rule, please take a look the sample.bmp

- Parent folder for the fonts : Under Calibre installation folder, \resources\fonts
- font folder name : All smaller case, the font name like liberation
- font files in the folder : font family name + -Regular, -Italic, -BoldItalic, -Bold (Should have all 4 with proper name)
-As an example, additional Droid fonts can be located under C:\Program Files\Calibre2\resources\fonts\droid. In this case droid(all smaller case) is the font name. The font files in this folder are DroidSerif-Regular.ttf, DroidSerif-Italic.ttf, DroidSerif-BoldItalic.ttf, DroidSerif-Bold.ttf. In this case DroidSerif is font family name(font name + decal). The font file names are case-sensitive. The plugin will not work if there are no font files.

* The ExtraCss will be like this. Please note that the font-family name is the font name from the file name. So far this is what I can do without making big changes(same naming convention, folder location from liberation font)

body {
	font-family: "DroidSerif";
}

* Advanced : You can put DroidSans under same folder. But the font file name should be some like DroidSans-Regular.ttf etc.

* Advanced : You can put any free font from Internet. As an example, if you downloaded SantaSerif, the folder name should be santa. And 4 style fonts need to be saved under the folder as SantaSerif-Regular.ttf, SantaSerif-Italic.ttf, SantaSerif-BoldItalic.ttf, SantaSerif-Bold.ttf. All the remains are change the EXTRA-CSS.

Thank you.

[artshim]

Originally Posted by artshim

P.T,
I put some additional code for some more flexibility. Below are usage,

I'd like to make it clear another font naming convention. If the font family name doesn't come with Serif or Sans, font family name and font name can be same except cases.

I just downloaded Arimo font from Google. The folder name is ....\resources\fonts\arimo and all the fonts name is Arimo-Regular.ttf, Arimo-Italic.ttf, Arimo-bold.ttf, Arimo-BoldItalic.ttf.

Thank you.

[lavomat]

⊥hank you! ⊥hree ⊥imes more ⊥han one!

[fiery]

I found another free good looking Serif font released recently from ParaType (paratype.com/paratype.ru). Font is free under the OFL (Open Font License). It includes Western, Central European and Cyrillic code pages. There is a Sans Serif version as well.

The advantage over the Liberation font is that the PT Serif Caption font looks bigger and more readable on the same zoom level. It's also a good solution where the last zoom option of the regular fonts is not big enough (most probably limited by the book's css).

[Ola Morris]

Hello, I have also got a problem with font in epub. I create an epub file in Calibre but the font shows as bold on my reader? Any ideas please? I have spent hours trying to work it out :S.
I use calibre, embedded fonts plug in to display the cyrillic characters, they all show ok, but bold. Please help!
Many thanks,

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Ola Morris

Hello, I have also got a problem with font in epub. I create an epub file in Calibre but the font shows as bold on my reader? Any ideas please? I have spent hours trying to work it out :S.
I use calibre, embedded fonts plug in to display the cyrillic characters, they all show ok, but bold. Please help!
Many thanks,

Is the problem in all epub files or just one particular one?

If it's one particular epub the problem is probably that bold is specified in the epub's .css file. You can always fix this manually but there is no "magic button". You could try a simple option first, but it may or may not work depending on the css inside the epub.

Simple
Do an epub-to-epub conversion in Calibre with this in the Convert - Look&Feel-ExtraCSS box:

body {font-weight: normal}

Manual - but more reliable

• Select the epub in Calibre and choose the Tweak-epub option.
• Press the Explode button.
• Find the file with extension .css and open it in your standard text editor.
• Search for text something like (may not be exact)
  

  font-weight: bold

  and change the word bold to normal
  You will need to be careful because some of these may be making your headings bold and you may not want to change those. Once you have finished save the changes, close the file and the text editor.
• If you are using Calibre v0.8, there is a Preview button which will let you check whether your unwanted bold has gone.
• Press the Rebuild button to recreate the edited epub and you are finished.

[Ola Morris]

This is happening to every single epub I create. I am giving up.

When it displays as normal on my PC (not bold) is displays as bold on my ereader. I Have uploaded fonts into my reader (have created a folder called 'fonts') - still no luck.
Any ideas?