If you’re working on a book that contains accent and diacritical marks, it’s very important to choose the right font format for design and typesetting.
Most of the older Mac fonts have limited character sets for accent marks and diacriticals. A lot of the common characters are in the font sets, including acute accents over a’s and e’s, etc., but I constantly run into marks that have to be “hand-set” by adding the accent mark after the letter it should go over, and then using kerning to move the accent marks into place.
Although far from ideal, this method has been working for me for a long time. However, now that I am converting print books into eBooks, the accent marks won’t display correctly if I use 2 keystrokes to create the accented letter.
Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this problem that will also make typesetting the print edition faster than before.
The Times New Roman font has a very complete character set and is the font most frequently used by the authors and publishers that I work with. I’m not suggesting that you typeset all books using Times New Roman, but if you run into a character that won’t display properly in the font you are using, try converting the character to Times New Roman to see what it’s supposed to look like.
I find that it’s best to use .otf (OpenType) fonts when designing print and eBooks. OpenType fonts have much more complete character sets than the older-type fonts. You can also use the OpenType Fractions with .otf fonts (Fractions doesn’t work with the older fonts).
When preparing a book in InDesign or Quark for both print and eBook editions, it’s more important than ever to keep the formatting as clean and streamlined as possible. I always consider the eBook edition when I’m working on the print files, but I am careful not to introduce eBook formatting that might interfere with the proper output of the print edition.
