I made a video about some higher level issues, including what to do with DropCaps, pictures and embedded fonts after you’ve converted from Word (or other software) to ebook.
Most mainstream publishers don’t embed fonts, because it makes the ebook bulkier and less easy to predict – it’s safer and easier to make a simple, lightweight ebook that just displays the text cleanly with no fancy stuff.
Actually, little considerations like not indenting the first paragraph, having line breaks between paragraphs and no indents, or starting paragraphs with a bigger letter are all possible, but not actually a big deal (they won’t make a big impression on readers, who see past those things and just read the book). So if in doubt, stay safe, don’t embed fonts, keep everything super simple.
But if you want to embed fonts in your ebook, here’s a guide to using Sigil in order to do it right.
You’ll need this bit of code for your stylesheet, to add each unique font:
@font-face {
font-family: “LHF Larcher Roman”;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
src: url(‘../Fonts/Larcher.ttf’);
Then you’ll need to upload the fonts into your ebook; then your paragraph style needs to “call” the font, like this:
.block_1 {
color: black;
display: block;
font-family: “LHF Larcher Roman”, serif;
font-size: 2em;
letter-spacing: 5pt;
line-height: 0.9;
page-break-after: avoid;
text-align: center;
text-indent: 0;
padding: 0;
margin: 0
}
This is not the same as embedding fonts in your Word Manuscript – which you can do before you save as a PDF (Kindle doesn’t seem to care about this, but IngramSpark is pickier so you might run into the issue).
For ebooks, you can basically choose a handful of standard fonts, but readers can set them according to their own style preferences. If you really need a custom font for a chapter heading (to match your book cover design) you might consider saving chapter heading images for each of your chapters and using them instead of text. It’s a little clunky but it can work great.
