Japanese and E-book readers: A guide

sholum Wrote:I've been fiddling with the resulting CSS files for about five hours now (on top of the couple of hours of searching the web) and have managed little more than causing the file to be unreadable.

The problem is most likely how zip together your changed files. The mimetype file must be first and not compressed in the archive. The easiest way is to create the epub file in two steps (from this guide):
The options (-Xur9D) makes sure that resulting epub file is as small as possible with no unnecessary metadata. I also explicitly excludes the mimetype file even if it should not be affected.

sholum Wrote:I realize that the Nook usually requires embedded fonts (though there are built in Android fonts that just aren't accessible from the GUI, but can still be used by files). I've tried getting an embedded font in it as well as trying to use the supposed Asian fonts described at http://nookdevs.com/Font_Changes but I simply don't have the knowledge to have any effect.

The problem is, the tool creates files that call for 'vertical_text.css' and it's relatives in the 'css' folder to, well, make the text vertical. From what I could figure, I need edit the file 'vertical_font.css' to call for different fonts (it defaults to some MS fonts). However, no matter how I try to do it, it doesn't work.
I checked the other files, but I can't find any mention of the fonts that I attempted to change.

I'm inexperienced when it comes to ePub and XHTML in general, so it's not surprising that I couldn't figure out how to edit the code. If someone could tell me what I should do, it'd be appreciated.

I think you should use an epub editor like Sigil instead of trying to make the changes manually. There are a tutorial on how to use embedded fonts (you add the font to the epub file) that also works for external fonts (the font is stored on the device) by using res:///absolut/path/to/font-file.

Embedded font: src: url('../Fonts/Garamond.ttf');
External font:
system font:
src: url('res:///system/fonts/DroidSansFallback.ttf');
or third-party font:
src: url('res:///system/media/sdcard/LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf');

You can preview the result of your changes by opening one of the xhtml-files (only works for embedded fonts, since the absolute paths is wrong on your computer). Don't worry if the text is shown sideways; it will work on a device that supports vertical text.