Setting custom fonts on Kindle Fire
Prescribing specific fonts in ebooks can be controversial, but there’s no doubt that it can be important to be able to make some typographic choices without having to embed a font in the ebook file, with the necessary font license, and all the other caveats that brings (such as getting this to work in Apple’s iBooks). One example I use again and again is setting headings and titles to be in a (i.e. any available) sans-serif font. This is a small design decision that can go a long way towards adding a professional touch to an ebook.
However, one problem I have always encountered is that the Kindle Fire mode in Kindle Previewer has never honoured the following CSS:
.heading {
font-family: sans-serif;
}
This week, I discovered why, thanks to this discussion. For whatever reason (i.e. ignorance of standards), Kindle Fire mode (not having a Kindle Fire myself, I have no idea if this is true for the real device too) requires a specific typeface to be referenced first, thus:
.heading {
font-family: "Arial", sans-serif;
}
Hey presto, it works. It shouldn’t, but it does. Given that the Kindle Fire only ships with 8 fonts (unless things have changed recently), it’s probably best to choose one of those in your CSS; I experimented with "Trebuchet"
, which is supposed to be one of the 8 and looks a lot nicer than Arial, but it didn’t work at all, simply rendering as a serif font, as before.