Font override and recall, epub documents?

[RootlessAgrarian]

(mentioned this on mobileread; dottedmag suggested 'open a ticket' so I am)

Ideally, my "perfect" ebook reader would allow me to remember – per book – what font I wanted to read that book in. It's part of the aesthetic experience of reading.... the font should be old-fashioned for "old classic" literature: for example Kipling or Conan Doyle might be appropriately dressed in Goudy Old Style or Baskerville Old Face. Nostalgic kid-books might look comfortingly familier in Century Schoolbook. More recent literature like William Gibson might call for a more modern face.

Anyway... I have epubs in hand and I have Calibre, so I can make my own "editions" – embed my own fonts and edit the CSS files and so on (very tedious artisanal stuff), but this would hardwire each epub for just one font, and I'd have to store N copies of fonts in many epubs on the reader (what a waste of space).

What I'd really prefer is to store N fonts on the reader and assign a font to an epub anytime during the reading process, while the book is "open" – and this font would be remembered, like a bookmark, and used when that book was re-opened. The assignment I suppose would be forgotten when that epub was deleted from the reader.

I am as yet a newbie to this software universe and so am not sure whether I'm asking for the moon and the stars here, or a relatively trivial (if tedious) bit of bookkeeping.

So far the native firmware (and Tirwal) on the Hanlin V3 offer only one font change option: you can change from the "default" system font to another font of the user's choice, but at the topmost level, not per book. And I have not yet been able to make even that basic selection affect the display of ebooks (not epubs anyway). I'm still exploring the html and css inside the epub zip archives from PG and other sources, and doing document conversions with Calibre to see what effect various format tweaks have on the output.

The pieces would be: 1) convention for directory to put user TTF files in, 2) menu option to change font while reading epub doc, 3) persistent memory associating last selected font with epub doc.

I'm ignorant as hell and well aware I may be talking through my hat :-) but "all I want" is to be able to *choose* what font is used to display an epub on my V3 – for both readability and aesthetic pleasure. Is there any prospect (hope) that OI may provide this feature any time in the next year or so? How hard would it be?

[RootlessAgrarian]

newbie news flash: I've found out where the font dir is (/usr/share/fonts/truetype...) and have loaded some favourite fonts onto the OI-equipped hanlin. guess I have to sit through a slooooow reboot (using OI-live) to see them in menus :-)

so far impressed by OI's ability to change fonts in epub. am beginning to wonder if dottedmag was gently pulling my leg (Brit-speak for 'having a bit of a joke with me') and this "new feature" is already implemented, I just needed to discover it :-) (just got madshelf running for the first time this evening so my experience w/OI GUI is very slender). will do more experiments over the next few days to see whether font assignments are remembered, for how long, etc.

[dottedmag]

http://openinkpot.org/wiki/User/Fonts

Actually I had no idea about fonts in epubs, especially with embedded fonts.

[RootlessAgrarian]

I really, really like the display options – margins, point size, font. huge improvement over the usual firmware.

I would love to be able to get at those options on a scripted basis rather than through the gui – when ssh'd in as root. are they visible in any kind of human-readable, vi-able (or emacs-able for you infidels) format? how much of FBreader and OI settings is visible at the cmd line? (I'm really hoping the answer is "all"!)

I dunno how many of my epubs have embedded fonts – that's whole new audit to do on the collection. so far I think the ones I've been playing with do not have embedded fonts but end up as whatever the reader s'ware thinks is the default.

[lunohod]

There are some config files in the /home/user/.FBReader directory. You can use FBReader on your desktop to find all possible options.

Btw, there is a ML for such talks.

[dottedmag]

Given the initial request is already fulfilled, I'm closing this ticket.

RA: IRC and mailing list are better for discussing such stuff. Tickets are for actual feature requests or bugs.