Probably a Kobo bug.

[eXistenZ]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

If you're creating your epubs in calibre, a simple

body {widows: 0; orphans: 0}

in the box Convert - Look&Feel - ExtraCSS should do the trick.

Thank you for the suggestion I tried moving widows and orphans from P to body, but nothing changed in the way kobo splits paragraph.

Still investigating for a solution, I found that opening it as kepub (.kepub.epub) the rendering is perfect, no widow orphan issue, but this is not a real solution.

[jackie_w]

@eXistenZ,

As mentioned earlier in this thread and other similar ones, there are probably several issues at work. Widows/orphans is only one of them. Individual epub, font face, font-size, page margins, line spacing are others. Last but not least is the known ADE rendering software problem with very long paragraphs.

With most of my own sideloaded epubs, if widows/orphans are set to zero in the body I usually only have, at most, one 'missing line' at the bottom of some pages.

If you have a non-copyright epub which displays the problem and you post it here, I could have a look at it.

[eXistenZ]

Thank you for the reply jackie_w, I know this is not the only bug, but luckily it's the only one annoying me, more luckily it's rare because such long paragraphs are rare.

In the first post there's attached a dummy epub expressly made to test this bug, in the CSS widows and orphans are set to 0 in P, I also tried moving them under BODY, nothing changed.

"known ADE rendering software problem with very long paragraphs" so it's a known ADE bug! were can I find references to this? I tried also the same tests on a PRS 350 and I can confirm that on the sony reader the rendering of long paragraphs is fine.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by eXistenZ

Thank you for the reply jackie_w, I know this is not the only bug, but luckily it's the only one annoying me, more luckily it's rare because such long paragraphs are rare. I can confirm that on the sony reader the rendering of long paragraphs is fine.

What I was trying to say is that sometimes, with some epubs, all these issues/settings seem to combine to give the pagebreak-in-wrong-place problem.

For instance, since my last post, I came across an example in my current book. At the end of a chapter there is a short 3-line paragraph. It begins on line 3 of the screen and should finish on line 5. However, line 5, for some unknown reason, has been pushed to a new screen containing one word only! If I adjust the font-size up/down a notch there is no problem at all.

I have seen similar, but infrequent, problems with every reader model I've ever owned (Sony PRS505/650/350/T1 PocketBook 360 and Kobo Glo) so now I just shrug and turn the page, where usually everything is fine again. Life's too short to get worked up about it (for me, anyway )

Another anecdote... last week I copied a rather nice weighty font to my PRS350 because it looked so good on the Kobo. When I opened my book (exact same epub as the one on the Kobo) it was practically unreadable because I was only getting half-filled screens on every page turn. That's not much text on a 5" device. All my other fonts work fine with that epub on the PRS350.

If someone can track down exactly why page formatting fails I'll be very happy, but at the moment there seems to be too many variables. The widows/orphans to zero definitely helps most of the time -- but it's not a cure.

[gwpartis]

I use a Kobo Mini and an Ipad to read books and found that books which display correctly on the Ipad sometimes display only half a screenful of text or less on my Kobo. By accident I found a way round the problem which involves a bit of work but gives good results so far.

A lot of my ebooks were originally text files or RTF files which I converted to epub format by saving them as Word files then using Aspose Words Express, a freeware tool, to convert the Word file to epub. This tends to produce an epub file littered with thousands of <span> and </span> tags in the most awkward places. Normally I use Sigil, another freeware tool, to edit out the tags with Search and Replace.

I accidentally loaded one file onto my Kobo without removing the tags and found examples of first letters of a word on one line with the remaining letters on the next line, quotation marks split from the text they were supposed to surround and words containing apostrophes split between lines. The incidents seemed to coincide with the span tags. The Kobo was treating the tags almost as a line break.

This set me thinking and after clearing out the span tags I inserted new ones where I wanted. I inserted <span> after each <p> tag and </span> before each </p>. After each full stop space and comma space combination I entered </span><span>. (Using Search and Replace in Sigil I made all the changes in a 560 page book in about five minutes.)

I then loaded the epub onto my Kobo where I had another copy of the epub with no span tags at all.

I found a place on my Kobo where the file with no span tags missed out half a screenful of text because the next paragraph was so long, moved to the same location in the file with my corrected span tags and found the problem had gone. Moving through the book I found that some pages showed only one or two blank lines at the bottom of the screen, many showed no blank lines. So far I have found none with a large number of blank lines. It isn't a perfect fix but I find it acceptable.

The only reason I can think of for why it works is that the span tags break up long paragraphs into smaller paragraphs and spacing the span tags as I did ensures that no words are split in two. I hope others find this useful.