By: Clint Adams
Link: View book details at Amazon
Conversion from Word to ePub and Kindle formats, 2015. Astrologer Evangeline Adams was the “black sheep” of her family and a descendant of presidents John and Quincy Adams. This historical novel chronicles her amazing rise to fame and fortune in early-twentieth century New York City.
The beautiful cover, which perfectly captures the essence of the book, is by graphic artist, John Barker of Stockholm Graphics & Design.
Interior formatting was straightforward except for finding open license fonts to match the author’s choices for headings, section separators, and simulated news clipping headlines. As you may know, proprietary Microsoft fonts are not embedded when a Word file is saved as “filtered HTML” for reformatting as ePub compatible XHTML, and the cost of purchasing three such fonts for one eBook is prohibitive.
In this increasingly common scenario, matching Open License fonts must be found to avoid illegal usage of proprietary fonts. Also, some “free for commercial usage” fonts that allow web usage may prohibit eBook embedding or require a special license for such “distribution.”
With some perseverance, suitable fonts with an SIL Open Font License (OFL) can usually be found. I recommend FontSquirrel as a starting point because it includes license information for fonts in its library.
For Evangeline, we used Oswald Bold (by Vernon Adams via Google Fonts) to replace Impact, symbols from DejaVu Sans (dejavu-fonts.org), to replace Wingdings2, and Cloister Black (by Dieter Steffmann from dafont.com) to replace Old English Text MT. The Symbola and DejaVu font families have excellent coverage of Unicode characters and both contain the symbols in Unicode ranges 2600 (Miscellaneous Symbols) and 2700 (Dingbats).
You can find fonts that support specific Unicode ranges by doing a Google search. For example, a list of fonts that support Unicode range 2600 is available at www.alanwood.net/unicode/miscellaneous_symbols.html.
DejaVu Sans is a huge font, so I transferred only the Sun, Moon, Star, and Jupiter glyphs to a tiny new font for embedding in the eBook. While the same symbols are available in other large common fonts, there’s no certainty that a reader of your book will have a particular font or a device that supports specific Unicode characters. It’s worth taking the time to find and embed a font that works in your eBook. Support for embedded fonts is now widespread and the standard going forward. I would no longer hesitate to include them in an eBook.
For embedding, stick to fonts that specifically allow embedding or eBook usage and you won’t have any trouble with Adobe Acrobat or Kindlegen. If you have FontCreator, it can easily display font properties such as license type and foundry. If you don’t have FontCreator, the font foundry or designer site should have that information.
The author of Evangeline, who has several other books at Amazon, is planning to distribute this book as an ePub and in print, as well as for Kindle. Visit the author’s website.