Quote:
Originally Posted by Anak
You're wrong. This is a Kobo formatting/styling kepub issue or bug if you like.
Kobo adds "kobo hack styles" (yes, that how Kobo calls it) to the original epub file obtained from the publisher and calls that epub a kepub.
These additional styles can break the intended layout formatting set by the publisher and make the actual output unpredicatable and uncontrolable. But this varies from kepub to kepub and you never can tell beforehand which kepubs might be affected with this issue.
If a original, publisher epub has no blank lines between paragraphs the kepub can either end up with blank lines between paragraphs or without. Roll the dice…
Why can other ereader manufacturers offer device specific features/settings that can be enabled or disabled by the user without affecting the layout of an epub? Features like text alignment, ligatures, hyphenation, font styles, social media features (FaceBook, Twitter) etc. Features that are identical or similar to the ones that Kobo devices offer but all features work with the original epub (and independed of the actual book store that sold it.)
Maybe Kobos development team can answer that.
|
No, your both right. The formatting of epubs is dependent on the publisher and how well the reader interprets them. The formatting of kepubs is also dependent on the publisher plus any extra styles that Kobo wants to add. A kepub is NOT an epub. They look a lot like them, but as Kobo's own format, it is up to Kobo to decide how to display them. But, Kobo has been moving towards treating them as epubs. Newer kepubs tend to have dropped the extra styling. Kobo have also fixed some of the older ones, but I think it is as people complain about them rather than a process to clean them all up.
My experience of comparing the epub and kepub versions of books I have bought from Kobo is that they are generally displayed the same. For most, if the kepub looks ugly, the epub is just as bad. I have few that the kepub looks worse. For at least one, I am fairly sure they were different versions of the same book. I suspect that a crappy version was supplied to Kobo for conversion to kepub. But a cleaned up version is was later made available for the epub but not supplied to Kobo. Or Kobo hadn't done the conversion again. And I have at least one where the kepub is the good looking version.