Checklist for getting publisher fonts in e-books right

So, getting publisher fonts in an e-book is a bit tricky. Here’s a checklist you can use when the correct fonts don’t show up in your e-book:

You’ll have to…

• 1. Add the font files to a fonts directory using Sigil (or any other e-book editor)
  2. declare the presence of the fonts and their variants (regular, bold, italic, bold-italic) in the Stylesheet.
  3. Call the font-family from the classes in the stylesheet
  4. Check for any encryption of the font files and remove that if it exists (which is illegal, but that’s not always relevant)
  5. Check for inconsistencies in the capitalization of the file names in the declarations
  6. Check for inconsistencies in the capitalization of the font-family names in the CSS classes
  7. Get the path to the font files exactly right (open the e-book in 7-zip to determine the structure of the e-book, no need for renaming to zip)
  8. Get the names and paths of the font files right in the Manifest (content.opf) (see #7 to find out what’s ‘right’)
  9. Get the media type of the font files right in the Manifest (different for each type of font)

Pagina EPUB-Checker will provide sensible error messages with line and column numbers.

There’s a lot that can go wrong with embedding font in e-books.
And then the reader chooses not to select the Publisher’s fonts in their e-reader options and all this work is moot.