I have been pondering on this subject in my attempt to understand how to choose the right font and I wondered if there is any way to determine how many kerning pairs there may be in a particular font? Or any similar useful information from the font file or elsewhere?

Then you could easily see whether you should waste your time with a particular font or not.

Thanks and best wishes

Thank you so much for sharing that Dwane. It is really interesting and helpful to know your approach. Being a novice it is quite hard to sometimes navigate all the do’s and the dont’s of typesetting and publishing, there are so many opinions and they can all seem valid to someone starting out.

With no formal training I quite often just use my eyes, look at other books see how they have done it and try to figure it out myself. Same goes for indesign, i have just tried my best to get good results by checking different articles here and there (indesign secrets is by far the best resource), watch tutorials on youtube and lynda.com etc. And with the first book not using the baseline grid i think i did a pretty good job. So when i found out about using baseline grid it kinda threw me off a little with what i had done before, but at the same time i can see the benefit of using it as it does set a visual order/formalisation to the way the page looks, which i think can help aesthetically.

So it is really useful and beneficial to hear advice from someone with your experience, thanks again!

Ok, thank you David. That is useful to know.

Best wishes

AHA! Now i feel like a right doofus!

Thanks again David! You’re a star!

Cool! Thanks David! I’m glad to know that i am starting to get the hang of this!

Yes, i have tried optical kerning with the fonts that have no kerning pairs and it seems to work really well. I am surprised at how few kerning pairs are to be font in many fonts though, even bought fonts from major font companies. Oh well, hey ho!

Thanks again for your help.

Best wishes

Hi there

For those who are interested i received this reply from the ebook conversion company today:

“The unicode transliteration characters are not supported by all devices, they work on the iPAD and some of the Amazon devices and also on the Nook although on the Nook the reader would need to adjust the settings to ‘publisher default’, the characters does not seem to work on the Kobo.

So there are two options for the text, one to embed as the sample provided but this will only work as above, or to image the text, please note images on devices will not resize like embedded text.”

To which i replied:

“So, i have a Nook and i have checked out the file on it and it looks pretty good. The Arabic looks a little faint as do some of the Unicode characters. So i am curious if it will look better not embedding the font?

If the readers that can’t support the Unicode and Arabic characters aren’t that many and the text looks better without being embedded, then that would be an option i would like to explore.

Would it be possible for you to send me the text not embedded, so that i can see what it looks like without it being embedded.

Also, i’m curious, did the Arabic script work/display without being embedded, albeit not all all devices?”

I hope that sharing this may be of use to someone, maybe you John Buterlin?

Also i have updated my font list that include the necessary characters for Arabic Transliteration, it can be found here: https://www.scribd.com/doc/227676611/Arabic-Transliteration-Fonts

Best wishes

Andy

Great! Thank you Dwayne! I’ll give that a try!