Serif Adobe Fonts
Glauco Schlembach
Script, brush and hand-written fonts are a great way to add an organic, homemade softness to your design. Paired with a sans serif or all on its own, these handcrafted fonts are perfect for your next fashion, travel, or typographic design.
I'm not a font expert. I'm currently looking for a good font for my dissertation document. By checking on an online website that identifies the font of a document I upload I've been trying to identify a font on a book which I really like. The result of the identification was itc stone serif pro medium. At least a priori it looks like a pretty nice font that could help my purpose. Apparently the font was developed as part of Adobe quite a while ago, but it doesn't seem to be part of the Adobe package anymore. Anyone has a hint on this? Is there anyway to get it through Adobe? Or anyone who could suggest a rather similar font within the current Adobe fonts? Thanks a lot!!
Doing a web search can indeed yield a number of font foundries offering licenses for one or more of the ITC Stone Serif fonts; if you are doing a publication such as a dissertation, you would likely need the matching bold and italic styles as well.
One thing you should check first. Many universities have very strict rules in terms of style and layout requirements for dissertations including which fonts are acceptable. Make sure that you have checked and understand those requirements before falling in love and paying for a license for a font that might not be acceptable to your university for your dissertation.
Might I ask perhaps if you would suggest another interesting font in the style of the Stone Serif? (I'm still in the lookout - I've been relying on Cambria for a while but it looks a bit too harsh for me at the moment, and Baskerville looks very nice but perhaps a bit too "literary".)
Personally, I would recommend Minion Pro or Minion 3 (an updated rendition of Minion Pro), Adobe Original font families that are available via the Adobe Fonts service. They are of the same basic style of serif fonts as Stone Serif and have not only a wide selection of glyphs and styles including bolds and italics, but are exceptionally readable both in print and on the screen. In my long career at Adobe, I have been honored to have known both Sumner Stone (ITC Stone Serif and ITS Stone Sans) as well as Robert Slimbach (Minion, Myriad, and many other Adobe type families).
I have seen multiple ebooks display featured fonts in Kindle without me having to download fonts to the device. Furthermore, I have seen other book formatting agencies use specialty fonts via Kindle. So, I'm wondering if leaving the font obfuscated strips the font on my end but maybe it will show in the published (purchased) version? This would be vital information to my clients, so any advice would help.
My sincere recommendation is that e-books, especially to the very closed and controlled Kindle platform, should not use specified fonts. The readers, again especially Kindle, really want full control of font, size, spacing etc. at the user's direction, and trying to impose a print-like format on this model is difficult, unreliable and contrary to the spirit of the medium.
It's not that there is some secret only the pros or commercial houses know, other than an understanding of what's something of a tightrope walk to get the least-glitchy, most-compatible result. At a minimum, it's a careful adaptation of font use to the layout, limiting certain choices and compromising the result, just for the trivial win of using a specific font. And even then, any reader out there may decide its base system font is a better choice.
You can do amazing things with just a serif and sans-serif font, each with four faces, and judicious use of simple graphics and color. Getting bound up on the idea that a specific font or fonts are needed is just... the wrong road for e-books, and making the mistake of viewing a rich medium through the limitations of print.
You say there's a way to do it, and I don't mind learning to wrangle the fussy part if that means my client can feature a fancy chapter header in their epubs. I don't bother with main text, just the chapter headers.
This makes me wonder if subsetting while de-obfuscating the featured chapter header font would be the way to go, then, because that also reduces the file size. Perhaps this is turning more into a legal question since Adobe states "any ebook authoring workflow which requires the user to move the font files themselves is not allowed under the Terms of Use," but I don't ever require my clients to move the font files; I just give them the epub file, and they turn around and publish it.
Adobe Fonts - the subscription service - provide only activated fonts in Windows/Mac, and web fonts via specific HTML (and on Adobe's servers). Nothing else at all. You don't receive any font files (or if you happen to find them, doing anything with them is a breach of the license).
Since the encryption is tied to the document, it's possible that hacking at the doc in Sigil is breaking the connection and leaving the doc unable to decrypt the fonts on the fly, meaning it can't use them.
FWIW, I am strongly against editing EPUBs or workflows that depend on "fixing" an ID export using any post-export tools. If this is indeed Sigil mucking up the embedded fonts... another point to my dislike for the approach.
If you insist on specifying the fonts and don't want to try and fix this licensing/encryption issue at the export stage, you could substitute generic, free-license fonts in place of the Adobe ones. There are close analogues, if not more or less identical ones, for most of the common book fonts.
The issue: embedded, obfuscated fonts in the epub default to KDP's Bookerly font inside of Kindle Previewer. The only way those fonts show as they should is if I completely remove the obfuscation in Sigil and set it to none. Once I do that, the fonts show up beautifully in Kindle Previewer.
I have tested the files in Pagina's Epub Checker, and they all come out valid, even after I've de-obfuscated the featured font.
This is what leads me to question if removing obfuscation is okay to do and to then hand to my clients, since I'm not asking them to "move" or do anything with the font files themselves. I've read subsetting could be a good choice, since it removes unused characters from the file, therefore rendering it useless if the fonts are actually used outside of the epub after I've given it to my clients.
If everything works with the font encryption removed after export... it all comes down to whether you want to respect the Adobe licensing agreement for fonts, which I think most of us here would recommend, but is one solution.
I still think the culprit is mucking with the EPUB file in Sigil, after export from InDesign. Try this: pass the unmodified export file to Kindle Previewer and see if the fonts work as intended, without errors, regardless of whether the book has the formatting you want.
Thank you, James. No luck with your suggestion. Exporting to a reflowable epub and viewing it in Kindle just displays their Bookerly font. I see a ton of conflicting information on other forums, and they don't really ever come to a solid conclusion.
"Chainprinter" (Adobe Cloud font)
It goes saying that I would love to also be able to successfully subset these fonts, but I feel like the universe hates me right now haha. I feel like all of this research and testing is two steps forward and three steps back.
I'll just point out that none of those fonts is distinctive enough not to consider reasonable substitutions, and all have free alternatives. (Gonestone is, in fact, a freebie version of the licensed Gunstone.)
I believe the indesign obfuscation doesn't work with current epub standards, so the remaining choice is to de-obfuscate or not use fonts. ID obfuscation passed all checks through version 4.24 but everything after was non-compliant
As for validators, there's only one validation that has any value: does the file work on either Kindle or a vanilla EPUB reader like Calibre? Everything else is pretty much irrelevant, of importance only when an EPUB is built by hand and all kinds of structural mistakes can be made. InDesign EPUBs can go straight to any but one or two oddball library/sellers without any errors, regardless of whether they tick every validation point. (And there's only one validator worth using for a technical check, EPUBchecker; most others are either that wrapped in a UI or, worse, EPUBchecker wrapped in a UI that then helpfully adds the developer's own notions of what's valid or not.) I don't think I've had a validation pass tell me anything useful, good or bad, with ID exports.
However, you're combining at least two situations here: Kindle and some other distributor, who I assume is EPUB-based. Whether the latter is fussy about passing EPUBcheck or not, it is extremely difficult to get designated fonts working in Kindle, regardless of EPUB source or validation. There's a whole chain of issues there, but it comes down to two things:
an experienced publisher does not designate fonts in either Kindle or EPUB, since the only real result is to bloat the file sizes, cause all the problems you're seeing and have the choices undone by various readers' programming. Trying to build e-book display around print concepts is an outdated model. Both the readers (hardware and apps) and the users can and will change the font, size, spacing etc. and trying to force their choices generally leads to problems.
And in Kindle, the fonts are irrelevant because the user can switch (globally) to any of the reader's base fonts. There's no reason to spec fonts, embed fonts or tear your hair out trying to fix embedded font problems... bypass all of those.
whelp.... mine just says "failed" which to me means they won't distribute a book with the ID obfuscation. so yeah.... I guess you can't include fonts, at least with my distributor. but de-obfuscation allows them to pass and show up in kindle. I guess it is then a professional / ethical consideration whether to include decrypted fonts in the file.
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