Font Formats for iPad eBooks

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To deliver your own fonts for eBooks on the iPad or other iOS devices you will need to include the following in an extra file called com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml inside the META-INF folder:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<display_options>
<platform name="*">
<option name="specified-fonts">true</option>
</platform>
</display_options>

But what format of fonts can you use?

furthermore...

There are several formats for fonts:

truetype, opentype, WOFF (Web Open Font Format) and some others.

WOFF is recommended by the IDPF and is mentioned in the specification for ePUB3, however, this format is not often available.

Including a truetype font will break validation to the ePUB3 standard (as of this writing). The iPad's support for the OpenType format seems a bit patchy from my experience. Sometimes, fonts in this format seem to have difficulty diplaying properly in sizes other than 100%.

For the sake of devices such as those that use the Adobe Digital Editions toolkit, you will need to specify the opentype form first in the @font-face rule like this:

@font-face {
font-family: 'AlegreyaRegular';
src: url('fonts/Alegreya-Regular.otf') format('opentype'), url('fonts/Alegreya-Regular.woff') format('woff');
font-weight: normal; 
font-style: normal;
}

However, this will then deliver the Opentype font to the iPad (and this is bad), so you will need to utilise the @media and orientation method to deliver an alternative @font-face rule that reverses the above order, prioritising the WOFF font for the Apple devices.

Posted on 23 Aug around 11pm

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