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• • April 7, 2017 at 5:20 pm #93615
    Christopher Panny

    Member

    Windows 10 64-bit, InDesign CC 2107

    I’m assembling a reflowable ePUB 3.0. for iBooks, which contains hieroglyphs, using the JSesh true type font. In some instances throughout the book, these characters are stacked, one on top of the other. I’d like to keep these as live fonts, but have been unable to come up with a way to do this. My first attempt was to create a small, single row, 2 column table, but regardless of size, the table loads on the very next line. I need it to stay on the same line as the text before and after, like it’s all part of the sentence. Then I tried converting the two fonts to outlines, grouped them and inserted them inline. This does work, but they get converted to PNG upon export, which means the color can’t change if iBooks’ background is changed (ei: black bg – white text). Then I tried using a separate CSS to adjust the baseline, via span tags, just to see if I could get the font lifted upwards, but iBooks is ignoring: baseline-shift: 0.5em;

    Any ideas?

    To see screenshots: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2300666

  • April 10, 2017 at 10:22 am #93624
    David Goodrich

    Participant

    When I need to use alphabetic typefaces that do not include some essential diacritics I must fake them. For example, I’ve made r-dot-above (U+1E59) by inserting a period after the r, raising it a few points, and then adjusting the tracking for the r to bring the dot over. That works okay for PDF, but I haven’t tried to see whether it would survive into e-pub. (For searchability I prefer to make U+1E59 in a custom version of the font).

    If you stick with combined outlines, you might try saving the vector artwork and then converting it to SVG format, which Epub3 is supposed to be able to use. Obviouslly the new symbol is not searchable text but depending on the SVG version it could hold XMP metadata — description, keywords, etc. — that your readers might find useful.

    Good luck!

    David

  • April 11, 2017 at 2:25 pm #93662
    Christopher Panny

    Member

    The eReaders out there are very inconsistent in what they support. I tested this on iBooks and it displays the JSesh font (hieroglyphs) just fine. But try loading it in Nook and the app crashes.

    I’m trying to stick with fonts, for searchability purposes. Also, fonts will change color, according to the background color. Black text for white background, white text for black bg. If I convert to PNG or SVG, I lose this ability.

    I found this one solution that I’m trying to get it working. https://codepen.io/anon/pen/ZedvpK

  • April 12, 2017 at 10:06 am #93677
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    I’m not sure how well inline-flex is across the ereaders, iBooks seems to stay ahead of the others. You might try Jquery, I found someone on stackoverflow using Jquery to create fractions which might be along the lines of what you’re looking for, seems similar to your codepen link. Though, like inline-flex, you might find issues with JQuery support, but it might be worth a try.

    https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13878772/how-to-display-classic-fractions-in-css-javascript

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