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Dedicated to the open source community, without which we would never have so many beautiful font designs.

Introduction

I’m afraid this is a bit of dummy book, mostly intended for testing with various font faces. If you were expecting a treatise on how to evaluate which typefaces are good for digital reading, well, you may find yourself a little disappointed.

Ultimately, this book has been exported to various formats, including regular .epub and .kepub, which you can use to check out what various given fonts look like on your favourite e-reader.

Evaluating typefaces for electronic reading

On various devices that use E Ink, it is possible to add your own font files, so that you can read using your favorite typeface at your desired size and thickness. Depending on the device you are reading on, you may find that some fonts work better than others.

You might be wondering why that is. Sometimes, fonts won’t be displayed correctly. Especially on platforms that use different rendering engines, this can be a real issue.

To properly evaluate whether a typeface works, it is imperative to evaluate the correct font files with correct metadata, otherwise the fonts in question may not load correctly, or may be displayed incorrectly.

A typeface is a family of fonts, often using different weights and appearances. An individual font file, often ending in .otf or .ttf, usually encompasses only a single style. So in order to get a typeface installed correctly, you need, ideally, at least 4 files to copy to your device of choice.

Variable fonts also exist, and those can be scaled in various ways (thickness, width, etc.), depending on how the typeface was designed in the first place. Most regular variable fonts only scale in terms of weight, and a family often includes two files: one regular variant, and one italic variant.

Unfortunately, variable fonts are not widely supported at this point in time on e-readers. In particular, Kindle and Kobo devices do not properly support these font files as of 2025.

A legal disclaimer

Font source files are usually legally copyrighted, and when you reproduce a font on a screen, you are reproducing that original design that is part of the source file.

That also means that you cannot just copy any font you want to your favorite e-reader and use it. Many fonts are simply bundled with your computer’s operating system for display purposes or for casual use with your favorite word processor or spreadsheet program.

Thankfully, many font authors are choosing more permissive licenses, like the Open Font License (OFL) which allows you to freely distribute the font files and use them for commercial projects without paying anything.

Most of the fonts included in my collection are OFL-licensed. If it wasn’t for this particular license, I would not have been able to make derivative versions and distribute those myself.

Copying font files

For e-readers, it is advisable to copy at least four different styles: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold + Italic (often suffixed as BoldItalic).

The collection of fonts that I have curated for Kobo devices has those files named correctly. For example, NV Garamond, which is simply an altered version of the excellent EB Garamond, will have four different files that need to be transferred.

Often, it is sufficient to copy these files over to the fonts directory on your e-reader. For concrete instructions, please consult the manual of your particular device.

In order to avoid issues with file corruption on Kobo devices, you do not want to put folders in the fonts directory, just copy over the font files directly.

There is one other thing you should take into consideration: in order to avoid issues, you should always restart your e-reader when side-loading fonts.

This may require you to hold down the power button for an extended period of time before the device will restart. Again, consult the manual for your device in order to find out how to properly restart your e-reader.

A chapter intended for font testing

This is a paragraph, which should contain enough text for you to be able to decide what font size and weight is your preference.

Another thing you may want to adjust is the distance between different lines of text, this is called line spacing. Depending on the built-in metrics of the font, line spacing may vary significantly.

Therefore, for fonts included in my curated collection, line height has been adjusted with the font-line program and set to 20%. This makes the spacing a little bit more consistent between different typefaces. (Certain renderers simply base their spacing based on the size of the font.)

Another factor is the thickness of a given font, or the weight. Some fonts have been optimized for legibility, so their regular weight may have been slightly increased. You are able to further alter the font weight on Kobo and Kindle devices, too.

A very important thing is to make sure that each of the four core fonts are being displayed correctly, i.e. no style mixing occurs. If font metadata is set incorrectly, you may find that all text is being displayed in bold or italicized (or worse, both).

If the font is not being displayed correctly here, it is very likely that it will not be displayed correctly in other books on your device. You may wish to pick a different font or reach out to the creator of the typeface for a potential fix.

If you are looking for the best possible rendering of text with options to further customize how text is rendered precisely, I can highly recommend KOReader. KOReader is also free software, and it available for various devices.

Let’s take a look!

As part of the next paragraph you can find four sentences, each of which corresponds to a different font style. You can use this section as a test to see if at least four different font styles are being displayed correctly.

REGULAR / ROMAN
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

ITALIC
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

BOLD
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

BOLD ITALIC
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

If the paragraphs above are all distinct and rendered correctly, you can assume that the typeface is being rendered correctly and you can enjoy your reading adventures without issues.

It is, of course, always possible that books provided by a third party or sold to you contains problematic markup, which may also cause rendering issues.

In that case, you may wish to contact the vendor for a potential fix or refund.

What is this?

This tiny digital book is distributed together with a collection of fonts that are part of the my ebook-fonts repository, a curated collection of fonts altered for use on e-reader devices.

For the latest updates and in order to download the various fonts, I encourage you to visit my website or the GitHub repository.

Happy reading!