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Astak 6″ EZ Reader reviewed at MobileTechReview – use your own fonts
September 4, 2009 | 5:39 pm
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By Paul Biba
Lisa Gade has just done a review of this unit and she quite likes it. You can find the review here.
However, one of the reasons I bring up Lisa’s review is that we have had some discussion here about how nice it would be to use one’s own fonts, especially bold, on an ereader. This may not be as simple as it seems. I quote those sections of Lisa’s review that discuss fonts:
… You can also specify your own font (any TrueType font is acceptable), though your custom installed font is only used for text and RFT files. … As noted, you can change fonts (we wish more readers offered this feature) but those fonts won’t appear in document formats that embed and specify their own fonts (only text and RTF files will use your custom fonts).
Now maybe some of our more ebook-format-savvy readers can let us know something about this. Do most ebooks contain their own font specifications, thus making it impossible to build a reader with fully interchangeable fonts?
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Comments:
Alas, the issue is not that cut and dried.
End user choice is usually a function of the reader software inside the device. Some apps are generous with end user overrides while others offer almost none.
I have a BeBook and the baseline firmware also lets you specify your TrueType font of choice for Lits and Mobis. The newer firmware supporting Adobe DRM is less functional, though.
With the alternative OpenInkpot, however, you can choose font face, size, line spacing, margins, first line indent, hyphenation, justification, and global screen bolding.
Plus you can chose whether to have an indicator bar or not and whether to do single or double column landscape with 4-way rotation. Not every feature is available for all formats but most are.
The catch is that some epubs are so hardwired as to block all end user preference and behave much like pdfs with most every reader app I’ve been able to try.
I am keeping a list of their sources; they will not be getting more epub business from me.
“I am keeping a list of their sources; they will not be getting more epub business from me.”
So which are the places doing this, Felix? Very helpful post. I totally agree with your concerns about PDFizing ePub files.
David
Cybook also lets you add any tt font you want to. It works on all file types except pdf of course. Pdf isn’t very flexible. Period.
Cybook lets you choose justification, choose from 12 different font sizes, flashing refresh or not, show header and/or pageometer (how far along you are in the book) or not, emboldened text.
Cybook really has a lot of features that I like a lot, and if they ever post the update to allow epub reading, and if it works well, it’ll be great.
In mobipocket books, if the font family and/or size are specified in the html, mobipocket reader doesn’t over-ride it. If the specified font isn’t on the cybook, then I can use any font I want.
Unfortunately, MS Word, which lots of authors use, writes terrible html, with font specifications at every single freaking line, so if you let MS Word convert your book to html, then use that html for a mobipocket ebook, people can’t choose the font, and worse, can’t change the font size!
So far it seems to me that epub does not let the reader choose much of anything (I’ve only tried epub on desktop readers). I hope that epub eventually gets to have all the very good features that mobipocket has.
Anyone making ebooks should not hard code any of these things into their book unless they have a very good reason to, they should allow the person reading as much choice as possible.
I ran into it with an epub from Simon and Shuster that was hard-coded with a San serif font.
The same file in Mobi displayed in *my* choice of font.
I’ve also heard of cases of hard-coded margins in epubs that waste half the screen space. In other cases zoom is blocked, preventing display at large font sizes.
It is one thing to give page designers flexibility to specify a clean presentation to their standards; it is something entirely different to allow them to *force* their choices over the paying customer’s preferences and/or needs.
ePub clearly favors publishers over end users in this particular tug of war.
An example of bad hard-coded margins is Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie (UK ebook from Gollancz). The margins are specified in “em” (character widths), and its standard margins are 0.5em. However, this gets interpreted by Adobe Digital Editions as 5em. This looks ok on a PC screen, but on a 5″ or 6″ screen with a large font 10em can be a large fraction of the screen.
I don’t know if 0.5em is supposed to be legal in the ePub standard, but since this ebook is DRMed it isn’t an ePub but rather an Adobe Digital Editions ePub. So if ADE screws up 0.5em margins there is no alternative. If the ebook was DRM-free there are other readers (at least on some devices), and Calibre could convert it to another ePub with different margins that would work with ADE.
OK, just like the discussion the other day. Simply strip the DRM, and use font embedding (@fontface) with CSS override in Calibre will basically solve most issues with fonts on the Sony 505. Get to make the margins and font any way I like for most formats.
A person creating books to distribute shouldn’t specify margins at all, in epubs or mobipocket books. They shouldn’t specify font family, font size, text color, line height, justification, background color, nothing like this at all. They should leave it up to the reading software, or hopefully (if it gives the person choices) the person reading. It’s all part of better quality ebook formatting.
1- Stripping drm is illegal in my territory. I shouldn’t need to break the law to have a good reading experience.
2- A product that needs end-user recompilation for satisfactory performance is, in effect, defective.
3- calibre is no panacea. Darned good but not perfect; I’ve seen it turn perfectly fine lits into barely tolerable epub.
4- And I’m a reader not a web designer; I shouldn’t have to learn css programming or xhtml to read a *commercial* ebook.
5- The more I see of epub variances/inconsistencies/user hostility, the more attractive kindle gets. Right now I’m basically waiting to see what comes first; a 5″ kindle or OpenInkpot for Hanlin V5. Whichever gets here first gets my next reader purchase.
6- epub needs a *real* certification program with teeth *yesterday*. Otherwise, epub will become whatever renders tolerably in ADE regardless of what the spec may say.