ETA: never mind this, it's less hassle just to do the bits in italics

[alexseanchai]

Okay. I'm working through Guido Henkel's ebook formatting series and there's bits in this short story where, if the ereader default font is serif, I want these to display in Verdana or other sans-serif, and if the ereader default font is sans-serif, I want these to display in Garamond or other serif. Think I can do that? How would I do that?

Comments

[kaberett]

this is doable, badger me if you're still interested in it

[alexseanchai]

I'm curious, yes.

But someone with more publishing experience than me observed that italics are less likely to weird out the reader as well as being a hell of a lot less complicated HTML/CSS-wise, so I'm not going to actually implement it in the originally intended project.

Soooo your call whether to spend time on showing me how!

[kaberett]

I mean, fair enough, but there's a fine literary tradition of e.g. Terry Pratchett using different fonts for different storylines! Reaper Man, I think.

[alexseanchai]

noted :)

I would like to know how yes please

[kaberett]

so one option is that epubs let you specify font, and later-generation Kindle devices will also display embedded fonts (provided "publisher fonts" isn't disabled). ebooks are fundamentally jazzed-up HTML. I would expect the way you do this is to define emphasised text as occurring in one font, and normal face in a different, with some conditionals based on reader settings. Given a raw file I expect I'd be able to dig at it and work the code out but I am cleaaaaaaaaaarly not scraping together the executive function to manage that without an actual file to play with, alas, but there's where I'd be looking.