Best practices for Fonts

[Forrest]

I am working with a company doing books. These books will be in 29 different languages for print and then to ePub. I am sure fonts might be an issue. I've already done some titles in Cyrillic (Russian) and when exported to ePub had all kinds of issues. The team will also be working on IOS and PC. Any suggestions on best way to solve possible issues?

[Dick Margulis]

Unicode. Don't mess with old, specialized "foreign language" fonts. Use
only fonts with Unicode support for the target language or languages in
question. That should solve 75% of your problems. I'll leave the other
25% to people who know more than I do.

[Rick Gordon]

Make sure they're compliant Unicode.

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On 4/1/13 at 3:24 PM -0700, Forrest wrote in a message entitled
"[ID] Best practices for Fonts":

>I am working with a company doing books. These books will be in 29 different languages for print and then to ePub. I am sure fonts might be an issue. I've already done some titles in Cyrillic (Russian) and when exported to ePub had all kinds of issues. The team will also be working on IOS and PC. Any suggestions on best way to solve possible issues?

--
___________________________________________________

RICK GORDON
EMERALD VALLEY GRAPHICS AND CONSULTING
___________________________________________________

WWW: http://www.shelterpub.com

[Sharon Villines]

On Apr 1, 2013, at 6:34 PM, Dick Margulis <di...@dmargulis.com> wrote:

> Unicode.

How do I know if they are unicode compliant? I just did a test export of a book to ePub and it failed on all counts. Fonts were substituted within the same typeface. Other typefaces came out something entirely different. Spacing was bizarre.

A horrible mess. Perfect in an export to pdf.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any..." Alice Walker

[Rick Gordon]

What do you see in the tooltips when you hover over characters in the Glyphs panel?

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On 4/1/13 at 7:16 PM -0400, Sharon Villines wrote in a message entitled
"Re: [ID] Best practices for Fonts":

[Rick Gordon]

If it's not OTF, it's probably not Unicode.

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On 4/1/13 at 7:16 PM -0400, Sharon Villines wrote in a message entitled
"Re: [ID] Best practices for Fonts":

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[Dick Margulis]

On 4/1/2013 7:16 PM, Sharon Villines wrote:
>
> How do I know if they are unicode compliant?

You're asking a slightly different question. Most modern OTF fonts are
Unicode-compliant, but that doesn't mean they have full support for all
the glyphs you need.

Suppose you need a Đ (U+0110) and you are using a font that doesn't have
it. The default behavior in a an HTML display engine (be it a web
browser or an e-book reader) when it encounters that code point is to
look for a font on your computer that supports it and to grab it from
that font, even if it is a poor match for the surrounding text. The
theory is that it's better to show the right character in the wrong font
than to leave a blank space or put up a box with a question mark.

So it's important to use Unicode fonts, but it's equally important to
select a font that has glyphs supporting the characters you need to
express in the text you're setting. Scroll through the glyph panel and
see whether it has what you need. If it doesn't, choose a font with a
richer glyph set.

[Rick Gordon]

And it's important to follow the proper procedures (which vary by reader platform, and in a few cases, embedded fonts are ignored) as to how to properly embed fonts, which by the way, InDesign can screw up on export.

------------------

On 4/1/13 at 8:01 PM -0400, Dick Margulis wrote in a message entitled

"Re: [ID] Best practices for Fonts":

>On 4/1/2013 7:16 PM, Sharon Villines wrote:
>>
>>How do I know if they are unicode compliant?
>
>You're asking a slightly different question. Most modern OTF fonts are Unicode-compliant, but that doesn't mean they have full support for all the glyphs you need.
>

>Suppose you need a ? (U+0110) and you are using a font that doesn't have it. The default behavior in a an HTML display engine (be it a web browser or an e-book reader) when it encounters that code point is to look for a font on your computer that supports it and to grab it from that font, even if it is a poor match for the surrounding text. The theory is that it's better to show the right character in the wrong font than to leave a blank space or put up a box with a question mark.

>
>So it's important to use Unicode fonts, but it's equally important to select a font that has glyphs supporting the characters you need to express in the text you're setting. Scroll through the glyph panel and see whether it has what you need. If it doesn't, choose a font with a richer glyph set.

[Bevi | PubCom]

<< If it's not OTF, it's probably not Unicode. >>

That's not quite correct.
All OpenType fonts are Unicode (one feature of the OpenType standard is that
it is based on the Unicode Character Encoding).

But OpenType fonts can have either .OTF or .TTF file extensions. When the
big 3 were developing OpenType fonts in the late 1990s, Microsoft decided to
keep its .TTF extension for its TrueType fonts which were being migrated to
OpenType. Also, it was Microsoft that started the computer industry's
migration to OpenType/Unicode, so they had the option to call the shots.

Consequently, many .TTF fonts are OpenType/Unicode. Older .TTF are not.

Example: Arial Unicode MS (ARIALUNI.TTF, not the regular Arial font) is
Unicode with 38,813 characters for the following languages:

Latin (which includes English and European languages)
Greek and Coptic
Cyrillic
Armenian
Hebrew
Arabic
Bengali
Gurmukhi
Gujarati
Oriya
Tamil
Telugu
Kannada
Malayalam
Thai
Lao
Tibetan
Georgian
Hangul Jamo
And many dialects of CKJ (Chinese, Korean, Japanese)

But just because a font is OpenType/Unicode (.OTF and .TTF) doesn't mean
that it will have the specific language characters/glyphs you need. It's up
to the font manufacturer to decide how many languages to accommodate in
their fonts.

The best method to tell if a font is Unicode and has the language characters
you need is to review it in a font management program, such as Linotype Font
Explorer X Pro (available for both Mac and Windows). www.fontexplorerx.com/
Or, if you're considering buying the font, check its technical specs on the
website as well as its full character set (not the short list of characters
that is usually the default listing).

A good font manager will answer all your font questions.

-Bevi Chagnon
(aka, the font fairy)
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New schedule for classes and workshops coming in 2013.
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[Sharon Villines]

On Apr 1, 2013, at 7:24 PM, Rick Gordon <li...@rickgordon.com> wrote:

> What do you see in the tooltips when you hover over characters in the Glyphs panel?

i see the GID and Unicode numbers, and the name of the glyph.

Two of the fonts I used are Swissa Piccola Regular and Swissa Piccola Underlined. In every instance, Underlined replaced the regular font. It's an OT font. Released in 2012.

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/jeremia-adatte/swissa-piccola/

ITC Kabel and Childsplay were both postscript and replaced with Times.

I used styles for everything.

The dingbat glyphs for a 2002 TT came out 20-30 times larger. It's huge. I can't even see all of it on the screen. It was used at 48 points.

Grouped text boxes were no longer grouped and reordered in strange ways.

i was trying to download some ebooks for my granddaughter who is facing a four-hour bus ride and found almost none at the library. If it is this hard to get anything legible in ePub, no wonder..

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC

"Nothing exists without order. Nothing comes into existence without chaos." Albert Einstein