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Embedding Fonts - Why not?

We are really excited about the news of iBooks Author, since we are graphic designers who run a large font website. The bad news, iBooks doesn't support embedding fonts in the iBook format. Why not? (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5072) - The only work around seems to be if you publish in PDF format, but of course that limits things. Various foundries and font sites offer licenses for eBooks, so iBooks should support this, it's an important aspect to the book design and communication abilities..


Please fix this in the next update? Pretty please....?

Posted on Jan 20, 2012 8:06 PM

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Posted on Jan 21, 2012 5:28 AM

The best place to ask Apple for fixes is


http://www.apple.com/feedback/ibooks-author.html

12 replies

Mar 29, 2012 7:06 AM in response to designgraphik

> The bad news, iBooks doesn't support embedding fonts in the iBook format. Why not? ... The only work around seems to be if you publish in PDF format


In the ISO 8879 SGML family of which ePub and HTML are implementations the author inserts character information and content information considering the logical reading order. Appearance and geometry is not defined early binding by the author, but late binding by the audience. Because Apple controls the configuration of the obligatory CMAP Character Map in the SFNT Spline Font files available for rendering appearance, the author is guaranteed that the character information will map as intended in whatever appearance the audience chooses. This is *not* the case with glyph encoding and character substitution, whether in Adobe Type 1 font program dictionary format or in Adobe and Heidelberg SFNT Spline Font files which should have been sold with character encoding and glyph substitution, but which were in fact sold with glyph encoding and character substitution. Essentially, Apple is doing in the iBook Store what Microsoft did in Word 1992, that is, supporting obligatory CMAP shaping only for character-glyph mapping, and supporting system supplied SFNT Spline Font files for appearance approximation over third party selectable font files (whose character-glyph mapping may be completely off the wall).


There is the additional problem that adding logical reading order to PDF in order that it may reflow for PDA Personal Digital Assistants with different geometries is as complex, if not more so, than doing the same for a model for document markup that was designed for defining reading order. PostScript and PDF were designed for defining layout rendering order, not for defining logical reading order.


Hope this helps,

/hh

Mar 29, 2012 10:39 AM in response to K T

> Developers can take advantage of additional font support when building apps - you may want to consider doing an app if this ability is crucial.


Basic character-glyph mapping is built into the obligatory CMAP Character Map of the TrueType Specification of which OpenType is only a rebranding (the difference between TrueType and OpenType is simply that the latter has the DSIG tag and the former does not).


Support for glyph substitution is necessary for conventional Anglo-American academic composition (ligatures, small capitals, monospaced tabular lower case numbers, proportionally spaced lower case numbers, superscript letters and numbers, subscript letters and numbers, and so forth.


It's correct that it's worthwhile to check the tools for developing a book or periodical as an application, which is also probably easier to protect as a commercial product, but it is still true the case that the font software has to have semantically correct mapping from information input to image output.


/hh

Mar 29, 2012 2:24 PM in response to designgraphik

I'm glad the font options are controled and limited. Opening up the books to embedded fonts would likely result in a host of issues including font corruption and copyright issues. For the most part any specialty text can be rendered in graphic form and embedded where needed. I know there are exceptions, but I don't see them worth the potential down sides.


Just my two cents.

Jan 19, 2014 7:16 AM in response to designgraphik

DesignGraphik, Bonjour!

We can now emb fonts with ibooks author.

I would only advise you to activate them using your computer's fontbook.


If you activate the font you intend to use on your ibook using other font managing softwares you'll probably have the same problem I did, which is when exporting the book the font will be substituted with a system font.


Using FontBook you won't have that problem and things should run smoothly!

Hope this helps! ,)

Embedding Fonts - Why not?

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