Times New Roman PS in ADE

[charobuwal]

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.

[Jim_Lester-oIBbX7]

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

[charobuwal]

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...

[Frustrated in AZ]

Let's start with the obvious. ADE is not Adobe Reader - and it does not

incorporate many of Reader's features. Jim Lester pointed this out to you

- and he was around when this package was written and updated.

Next, you may be 'sure' that there are lots of ebooks with Postscript

fonts, but I know of none - and I have over 5,000 titles on file.

==================

[Jim_Lester-oIBbX7]

"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.

[charobuwal]

As you probably suspected in your p.s., I wasn't talking just about EPUBs, but also about PDFs. E-readers are and will be evolving to ever higher resolutions and are already capabable to synchronize with PC-installed e-readers. Because of that, E-readers aren't just used to read ordinary published e-books anymore. Many users put all kinds of their own personal and professional stuff on their E-reader as well. On my E-reader more than 50% is. Think of reports, dossiers, manuals, brochures, theses, surveys and so on. Amazon and Apple are even promoting to put all your personal/professional stuff on and sync with the cloud. These personal/professional documents were often published in the past in pdf format using MS Word or similar software. I regularly stumble upon postscript fonts in PDFs that I'm reading in ADE and I'm sure many other ADE-users do as well. In other e-reader forums you can read how important fonts are for e-reader users. Many users have tried many fonts on their e-reader before they found one they're satified with to use as their standard one. In my view that justifies a selectable font feature in ADE, which is still missing in ADE 1.8 preview.

However, the answer you gave explains a lot I think. Could it be that Adobe focused primarily on EPUB format in defining their requirements for ADE, not realizing that users might want to use ADE more and more for their own (old existing) PDFs.

BTW I'm not sure about Minion. The sample I provided doesn't look like Minion to me.

[Frustrated in AZ]

I think you're missing the point.

ADE had design parameters that originated in the late 1990's. You can get

an idea of what they were then and now from the ADE HELP function, which

tells you what ADE will and will not do. Other companies wrote software to

do the same job back then, and ALL of the packages that you'd run into

commercially have the same general limitations. Each package has specific

limitations which may or may not be the same as another package. Whether

you think ADE or any other package should have certain features is more of

a personal opinion, especially as you support your comments with vague

references to 'many users', etc.

If you wish to prod Adobe on improvements to their software, it's likely to

be more beneficial and probably more productive if you contact Adobe

directly. This forum is intended to help people with problems associated

with using ADE in conjunction with their ereaders and documents.

==============

[charobuwal]

I don't want you to get more "frustrated" than you obviously already are, but your contributions to this topic haven't been very helpful to me til so far. Of course I am aware that ADE is something different than AR. This forum topic is about ADE's (non-)support to Postscript fonts. ADE's Help page doesn't say it will not render Postscript fonts and ADE's feature list says "Digital Editions offers native support for PDF/A and EPUB formats". It doesn't mention that ADE doesn't support PostScript standard fonts such as Times or Helvetica, which is a key element to PDF/A compatibility. So IMO it seems perfectly OK to put my question and comments here as forum topic and if not I would like the administrator to tell me. While I am newbie to this forum, I did read the forum's etiquette first before posting here and I suggest you do the same. Beyond other things it states clearly "Don't be afraid to identify errors or shortcomings in Adobe content. Your feedback is important!" and that's exactly what I am doing here. If you have valuable contributions to this topic, I still welcome them; if not keep them please to yourself. Thank you.