Epub not displaying fonts

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Epub not displaying fonts

I work for a company creating ibooks - one of the books needs to also be publishied as an ebook. I began creating an epub in indesign, but was having difficulty - by boss suggested we try pages as it is similar to iBooks Author. The book is text heavy with images throughout.

On the indesign epub the fonts I the client wants showed up fine, but when I copied and pasted it into Pages and exported it, I had a warning that the styles wouldn't show up - and low and behold they haven't. They obviously are compatible with epub as they worked fine before. I want to carry on using pages as i find it much more simple and fitting for this project.

here the original indesgin epub is in Adobe digital editions (and how it looks in pages)

but here it is when exported from pages:

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Feb 5, 2013 7:29 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 5, 2013 7:50 AM in response to bett n_

I imagine that if you had to pull up the ePub in Sigil to tweak the css and xhtml sources to explicitly use the desired fonts that the fun would vanish pdq.

In Sigil, does the exported ePub view differently than within Adobe Digital Editions?

Did you create new paragraph styles within Pages that explicitly use the desired fonts previously used within InDesign?

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Answer 2

Feb 5, 2013 8:08 AM in response to VikingOSX

Adobe has made no effort to support Apple devices in Digital Editions. That might have some bearing on compatibility of ePub documents exported from Pages as viewed in Digital Editions.

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Feb 5, 2013 8:11 AM in response to bett n_

Pages can't embed fonts. If you do not use one of those already present on iOS, it will not be displayed.

InDesign can do that. So does iBooks Author (but this app does not produce .epub).

I think you can find some articles about embedding fonts for iBookstore epubs via a google search.

The fonts on iOS can be found at

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5484

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Answer 4

bett n_ Author

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Feb 8, 2013 6:06 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thankyou, i thought that might be the case. I am trying to create an .epub that can be read on anything, and as a separeate file, an ibook.

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Answer 5

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,876 points

Feb 8, 2013 7:21 AM in response to bett n_

bett n_ wrote:

I am trying to create an .epub that can be read on anything

The normal procedure for .epub ebooks is for the reader to select what font and font size he wants from a selection offered by the reader app. If you need to control those things yourself, then you may want to use the "fixed layout epub" format. I think you can find info on doing that pretty easily via a google search.

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Answer 6

bett n_ Author

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Feb 8, 2013 7:35 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

thankyou that is realy helpful.

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Answer 7

Dec 19, 2013 4:51 AM in response to bett n_

In case anyone’s still looking for a solution to this the Sigil FAQ has an answer.

You need to open the ePub in an archive program (they are just ZIP files) and add an XML file to the META-INF folder. This file should be named com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml and should have the following content:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<display_options>

<platform name="*">

<option name="specified-fonts">true</option>

</platform>

</display_options>

A mystery why Apple chose to do it this way, but this seems to work...although iBooks still seems to do some unnecessary font substitution, but it’s unlikely to affect you unless you’re doing something fancy like using a long s.

Edit: MobileRead Forums is a good place to find help with e-book formats.

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