We have stressed it before and we will keep stressing it: how important it is to create a digital book in an orderly manner, through an organized and consistent process - and no less important, the checking process once the book has been created.
For those of us who use InDesign to create a digital book, it is highly recommended not to rely on Adobe to meet international standards, even when everything looks "fine".
As part of the process of producing an EPUB in InDesign, there is an option to embed fonts. Put simply, this means storing the actual fonts we used inside the book itself, so that a reader who opens the book will see the text in the font we chose rather than the device's default font.
The problem with most fonts is copyright. A font, like a book or any other work, is protected by copyright. The moment we export it into an unsecured file such as an EPUB, there is a risk that the font will find its way into uses its creator never agreed to.
InDesign does indeed embed the fonts when we ask it to during export, and the files really do appear there... but have you ever tried to open those fonts? To actually use them? It will not really work for you. InDesign encodes the fonts on export. And yes, you guessed it, Apple's iBooks app handles that encoding just fine... (a cozy little monopoly arrangement, did someone say?)
The recommendation, therefore, is to always inspect the file exported from InDesign. It is not a good idea to package an encoded font that will not work across all the standards-compliant apps.
If the font is a free one, or you have permission to use it in your digital book, the simple recommendation is to manually replace the encoded fonts with clean ones.
But that - is for the next post! (Did you really think the party was over??)
