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C
charobuwal
Participant
May 21, 2012
Question

Times New Roman PS in ADE

  • May 21, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 6504 views

It turns out that text that is written in "Times New Roman PS" has a problem in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). PS in "Times New Roman PS" stands for PostScript. This is a default font used by Microsoft and Apple applications. Now the ordinary "Times New Roman" is perfectly rendered by  ADE and Adobe Reader. However, the "Times New Roman PS" font is only rendered well by Adobe Reader, but is replaced in ADE by some unknown Serif font (probably Adobe Serif MM?) with low dotted i's which makes you tired after a few pages (at least me); that is if you read in normal page-mode. I attached a few screenshots taken in ADE 1.7.2 and AR 9, so everybody could see the difference.

I tested this out and I don't think I am wrong here...but still may be. So my question here is why would Adobe not support "Times New Roman PS" in ADE? I am sure lots of e-books are published in "Times New Roman PS" and lots of ADE users get irritated and even may reject ADE as their e-reader.

AR - TNR - High dotted i

ADE - replacement of TNR-PS - low dotted i

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

J
Jim_Lester
Participating Frequently
May 22, 2012

Only otf and ttf fonts are supported- so you are getting default font.

C
charobuwalAuthor
Participant
May 22, 2012

Thanks for confirming what I already suspected. I suspect that ADE doesn't support "embedded" PostScript fonts either, just OpenType and TrueType, am I right?

However, my question - as I meant it - was why Adobe doesn't support PostScript fonts in ADE. Let me explain:

Adobe does support PostScript fonts in its PDF reader already for a long time. So an average ADE-user (like me) would expect ADE to support PostScript fonts too... And why would ADE replace a PostScript Serif font like "Times New Roman PS"  by "Adobe Serif MM" , while this font that was introduced back in 1994 and was never designed to read from a screen. As I understand "Multiple Master" (MM) fonts are programmable fonts that are able to resemble the original requested font by adjusting variables. That feature makes it ideal to function as a default font. However it looks like readability is not one of the principles that the ADE-engine uses to shape the "Adobe Serif MM" font. On top of that the "Adobe Serif MM" in itself is a postscript type 1 font like all MM fonts, so in my opinion ADE must have some postscript-engine on board to render  "Adobe Serif MM".

As an ADE-user I would expect that I would be noticed that a requested font is replaced by another font, but even more important I would appreciate the possibility to select the default font myself very much. Unfortunately this isn't possible in ADE 1.7.2.

It doesn't make sense to me at all that ADE isn't prioritizing readability. It looks to me like a missed opportunity.

Any ideas, views or answers highly appreciated...

J
Jim_Lester
Participating Frequently
May 23, 2012

"why Adobe doesn't support PostScript fonts in ADE."

The EPUB (2) spec only has OpenType support as a strong 'SHOULD' and all other fonts as a 'MAY' for the reading systems (ie ADE).

For content creators they strongly suggest using OpenType fonts, and say that if you include other font types you should have an OpenType font equivalent as a fallback (which I'm assuming you didn't do).

Commonly either OTF or TTF are used if you want to embed a font. Postscript fonts aren't commonly used and there has been no serious demand from the publishing community to do so.

"[paraphrase] Why is Times PS replaced by Adobe Serif MM?"

1.) Like I said PS fonts are not supported - so it's not so much replaced as completely ignored and the default is used.

2.) The default Serif font IIRC is Minion (Myriad is the Sans-Serif).

"As an ADE-user I would expect that I would be noticed that a requested font is replaced by another font"

LOL.... and how would you know which font was supposed to be used, in the first place?

---

p.s.  Just in case you were talking about EPUB and not PDF content?  You didn't specify, so I was assuming EPUBs.

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