How to create an embeddable font?

#1

I used Illustrator CC (23.0.1) on Windows 7 to create an otf font.
I used that font in InDesign to create a document.
I exported the document to epub format, including the option “Include Embeddable Fonts.”
But when I opened the epub file in Kindle Previewer 3.28.1, it did not show my font.
Someone on an Adobe forum said the font needs proper “encoding bits” (or something confusing). I recall an Adobe Help page saying it needed “embeddable permissions,” but no one explained how to make that happen.
I’m hoping it’s some magic HTML or XML I could stick in the Licensing field in Fontself’s Font Infos.
(I had hoped it was related to the Copyright field, but I blanked that out, and the font still did not embed.)

Any ideas how to use Fontself to create an embeddable font?

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#2

According to the OpenType Specification, the OS/2 table has field fsType which sets the Embeddable permissions. Fontself produced an otf with an Embeddable permission of Installable (according to FontForge), which is the least restrictive option. The font did get embedded when I exported to an interactive PDF, but apparently not to an epub. I am suspecting the problem is one of:

  1. InDesign is incorrectly not exporting the epub with the embedded font; or
  2. Kindle Previewer is incorrectly not recognizing the embedded font; or
  3. My fonts somehow have bad paths.

Anyway, it looks like it is not a Fontself problem (unless the problem is #3 and Fontself didn’t warn me).

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#3

No experience with font embedding here, but the fsType field is set to 0 by default (no way to tweak it for now), so the font should be embeddable.

One potential conflict could be that glyph positions are stored with floating point values for extra precision, so using a third-party converter to a TTF file with integer coordinates could be a solution if that’s the underlying issue.

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#4

I experienced a similar problem. My OTF font file generated by Fontself looked fine in MS Word, even zoomed all the way in, but whenever exporting as a PDF, it always seemed to export as a bitmap image, which suggests that there was a problem embedding the font file in the PDF.

I got around this problem by converting the OTF to a TTF, as suggested by Franz above, and then the PDF export from Word worked fine.