[How-to-Fix] Bold / Italic not showing in Epubs

Making Epubs is a pain in the ass. You can't just convert a PDF into an Epub that can be used effectively for e-readers as it requires style formatting and further editing. One thing that was super annoying was that Bold & Italic text wasn't showing properly. The Epub worked fine in Adobe Digital Editions, but the font style didn't show up correctly in Calibre.

One way to fix this is to manually dig into the Epub and change the CSS (rename the file's extension from .epub to .zip or .rar -> open it -> find "template.css" -> edit the CSS in an editor such as Dreamweaver -> save -> rename file extention back to .epub). This option is very tedious and sensitive to errors, but it does the job.

Later I found out it could have been fixed way easier... Upon exporting your Epub in InDesign, go to the Contents tab and Uncheck "Include Embeddable Fonts". This is very counter intuitive as you might think you would want to embed any fonts for it to be able to display your fonts properly.


Anyway, easy fix... took me hours to figure out... hopefully I can save someone some headaches :)


[How-to-Fix] Joomla!: Enabling Object, Embed & Iframe

Joomla blacklists <object>, <embed> & <iframe> by default for security reasons and filters out and removes these tags from your articles if you try to add them in your content. The iframe and embed options are useful to integrate e.g. Google Maps and Youtube. There's a solution to disable the filtering by de-selecting certain user groups in joomla as blacklisted for filtering. This didn't work for me though.

Instead, here's a method to get it to work by diving into the PHP file itself. To disable the filtering, edit the filter PHP file and remove the tags from the blacklist.

Path: libraries\joomla\filter\filterinput.php

$tagBlacklist = array ('applet', 'body', 'bgsound', 'base', 'basefont', 'embed', 'frame', 'frameset', 'head', 'html', 'id', 'iframe', 'ilayer', 'layer', 'link', 'meta', 'name', 'object', 'script', 'style', 'title', 'xml');

 


Useful Wordpress Plugins

Here's a list of useful Wordpress that I'm currently using for my blog. If you happen to know any other plugins that I should know about, feel free to post it on the comment section below :D

1. Add Link to Facebook

This plugin will allow you to publish to Facebook whenever you publish a post on your blog. It automatically adds a link to your posts or pages that are being published to your Facebook wall, pages or groups. Simple one time setup and forget. The way links appear on Facebook can be customized.

2. Akismet

Installed by default when you install Wordpress on your website. You can use it for free and it does a really good job of protecting you from any kind of spam!

3. All in One SEO Pack

Great package for all your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) needs! It's very extensive and you can customize it to your liking. This is a must have if you want to make your blog and content visible on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

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