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leannz30751615
Inspiring
December 5, 2023
Question

Mangled style in ePUB export

  • December 5, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 872 views

Exporting a 900+-page whole book to fixed ePUB layout through book flyout menu. No option to embed/not embed fonts. One style is exporting as half regular and half italic (see screenshot). No overrides. All other header styles export fine. Thoughts? Thanks.

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    1 reply

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    December 5, 2023

    This is (almost) invariably caused by a mix of fonts installed on the system., for Macs in particular. Something about how fonts are managed both by the system and CC/InDesign... and there my understanding of it runs out.

     

    If you're on Windows, uninstall or deactivate the whole font family and then do a clean reinstall from a 'best' source like Adobe or Google if you don't have original, uncorrupted font files from some other source.

     

    Making sure the system has one and one only set of that font is usually enough. But you might need to do the IDML to INDD save/purge step after the fonts are cleaned up, as well.

    L
    leannz30751615Author
    Inspiring
    December 8, 2023

    I found 1 additional instance of the font and deleted it, but the problem remains. I have discovered that a PDF of the whole book does not have this issue, nor do ePUB exports of individual chapters - it seems to be tied to exporting the whole book to an ePUB. On a critical deadline, hoping someone has previously dealt with this issue.

    James Gifford—NitroPress
    James Gifford—NitroPress
    Legend
    December 8, 2023

    This is not an uncommon problem. It comes up a few times a year here. I can't think of a time that it didn't trace back to a font "mapping" issue caused by one system/app fault or another. I also can't think of a time that the specific, technical fault was ever isolated; fixed EPUB is such a mess that you can only keep changing the input components and hope it straightens out.

     

    But deleting one stray font isn't the solution, nor quite what I suggested. 🙂

     

    First, try substituting any similar font — mostly, of approximately the same style and width. While the layout and the export might be a bit messed up, I'd bet that will elimatie this erratic mapping. (Unless you choose a second font with the same problems...)

     

    Then, delete the ENTIRE faulty font set from your system. Uninstall, deactvate, remove font files. Nothing short of that has ever seemed to fix either corrupted font files or faulty "mapping" of the fonts as ID uses them. If you're on Mac, be sure you clean out all the various font repositories. (Again, I understand that ID and/or Adobe maintians one separate from the system cache... but that's the limit of my understanding.)

     

    Then, install the font from new, clean files, from an original source if possible, not through a font website.

     

    And it's probably a good idea to do the save to IDML and reopen/save as new INDD purge to clear any remaining corruption or faulty font assignments.

     

    If ALL of that doesn't solve the problem, it's going to be a tougher fix. To the best of my recollection, though, these steps have fixed this exactly export problem multiple times before.

     

    The real solution, overall, being... don't use fixed-page EPUB. 🙂

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