More On Fonts

For reasons (one assumes) of readability (and not, one hopes, simple control-freakishness), Amazon Kindle Desktop Publishing overrides any fonts specified in an eBook, instead displaying all books in whatever preferred reading font face the Kindle user has chosen.

Now there are sound reasons to do that. I get it. Really I do. Some people pick ghastly text fonts. I have a particular hatred for Times New Roman, in my opinion one of the most horrible text faces ever designed, with its primary intention that of remaining more or less readable while jamming as many characters as possible onto a fixed-size page. I have my Kindle reader app set to one of the cleanest available (within Kindle, that is) sans-serif fonts. (I detest Roman serifs. They're ugly.)

But come on, KDP. There are times when a writer wants to set off a small amount of text in a different font for a specific creative effect. Godthief has a preface containing the text of the Prophecy of Tendarrion, and a brief excerpt from a discussion of prophecy by Sage Ryanon of Krent, both in appropriate font faces.

Kindle smashes them both flat.

The fourth chapter of my current work-in-progress contains the text of a brief handwritten letter. I went to a great deal of trouble to find and select a freely-licensed, clean, readable script font that looks like an elegant copperplate hand. I went to the trouble of finding out how to properly embed a font into an EPUB3 eBook, including figuring out a widespread documentation error. (See my previous post.)

To no avail. Kindle smashes them flat.

SUPPOSEDLY, Kindle honors and preserves embedded custom fonts in headings.

No, it doesn't. Not unless there is some undocumented secret to what Kindle will acknowledge as a heading. Certainly using an XHTML heading tag doesn't work.

Readability is important. But so is the artist's, or writer's, intention. Nobody would say that it was acceptable for Kindle to smash all book covers down to a plain white page with the title in black.

And it's not acceptable for Kindle to smash custom fonts used in strictly limited places for specific effect, either.