Epub books text justified with update?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by iozy

I'm not complaining about ragged right, I can live with it. I am moaning about huge margin sizes. On a recent epub purchase, the standard S was about 6pt. Way too small. With huge borders. So shifting up to M results in a readable font but even bigger borders, resulting in only 50% of the screen being used. That particular epub looks much better in landscape mode... BUT I just know if I had bought everything in LRF, everything would fill the screen and be the right size mostly... come on SONY, polish the ePub firmware for the 505!

This is nothing to do with Sony. The margin size is determined by the person who created the book - precisely as it is with LRF. I really don't understand, therefore, how you can "know" that the margins would be correct in an LRF version of the same book, since one might reasonable imagine that they would make the same choice of margin size for both formats.

[krischik]

Originally Posted by informale

Hmm.. how about writing an open letter to Sony concerning this issue?

Like this one?

[radius]

Originally Posted by iozy

I'm not complaining about ragged right, I can live with it. I am moaning about huge margin sizes. On a recent epub purchase, the standard S was about 6pt. Way too small. With huge borders. So shifting up to M results in a readable font but even bigger borders, resulting in only 50% of the screen being used.

What I do in situations like this is eliminate any DRM then hand edit the CSS to values that I like. You have the option to increase your base font size, to shrink the left/right margins or both.

If you don't want to do it by hand, Kovid's Calibre will be happy to give you a handy GUI for doing such things.

Finally, you could try Valloric's Sigil editor to change those values.

[JSWolf]

I remove the DRM, edit the CSS to fix the margins (I like no margins), change the font to fontin (unless there is already a font embedded), and fix anything else that may need fixing and I'm good to read. I like the base font size whatever it is at default.

[Mayr]

I really have to check the tutorial about editing the text layout. Is it simple like assessing a file via notebook in windows and changing a couple of values?

[iozy]

I know, I did place the qualifier mostly... The majority of ePubs I've bought were clearly not tested on or made for the Sony, the margins (some more than 2cm) are a waste of screen space and the text at S is often around 6pts. Some are fine. The majority of LRFs have obviously been made for the Sony and are usually within a few pixels of the edge of the screen and make good use of the Reader screen. Now as regards my criticism of the Reader ePub support, all the ePubs I've bought look wonderful in the Adobe viewer, all wrap to the size I want and display beautifully, typographically correct. So I was thinking that the firmware could be polished to automatically strip margins or reflow/wrap text to make full use of the Reader screen.

Having seen a number of books in both formats, I can say the LRF mostly had small margins and the same book sold in ePub had huge margins and erratic text sizes when displayed on the Sony, even some instances of text changing size mid chapter to form ridiculous 'pull quotes' not visible when viewed in Adobe viewer on the laptop.

So I thought it was reasonable to assume that the problems lay with the firmware's handling of the ePub format. Harry are you wonderfully happy with the way the 505 natively displays all of your ePubs?

[iozy]

Wow thanks for this tip, I didn't know anything about this. I really don't want to convert my ePubs to LRF as things sometimes get chewed up and erratic things sometimes happen mid-chapter... so a simple way to just edit the margins and basefont size in the extant ePub would be a dream come true... Thank you so much, I'll get right on it...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by iozy

So I thought it was reasonable to assume that the problems lay with the firmware's handling of the ePub format. Harry are you wonderfully happy with the way the 505 natively displays all of your ePubs?

Other than the lack of full justification, yes I am. Have you tried the ePubs that I've created on your 505? They look just fine to me.

[iozy]

Yes they look wonderful, it's the people at Penguin and Little, Brown et al that I have a beef with...

[BlackVoid]

Originally Posted by iozy

Is there a way to process epubs to a pdf or so? If I convert them to LRF in Calibre the text size is usually all over the place with sudden pull quotes in large followed by the smallest text imaginable.

Try to convert it with some other tool. Calibre is actually not so good at converting.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

Personally I find ragged-right margins easier to read, so I don't know how many customers will be clammoring for full justification.

+++


.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by iozy

Is there a way to process epubs to a pdf or so?

I highly recommend Jellby's script for converting an ePub to a PDF ; you can customize the "page" size, font, font size, margins, etc., to whatever you want. You also get nice things like kerning, ligatures, end-of-line hyphenation.

The script can be found in post #11 in this thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=56310

Unfortunately, it's a bash script, and AFAIK has only been tested on linux machines, though theoretically it could work on a mac or windows with Cygwin or similar installed.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

Personally I find ragged-right margins easier to read, so I don't know how many customers will be clammoring for full justification.

Once you pass 40yrs or so and need reading glasses, increasing the font size helps but makes full justification w/o proper hyphens look horrible. Before I converted all my files to epub I used the firmware hack to turn off full justification for my LRF files as well.

Full justification in a printed book with hyphens looks great but is a disaster in an ebook reader without hyphens and an increased font size.

It would be nice to have a flag in the settings of any reader that allowed you to turn full justification on or off.

[BlackVoid]

Originally Posted by iozy

I really don't want to convert my ePubs to LRF as things sometimes get chewed up and erratic things sometimes happen mid-chapter...

What are you converting with? Maybe you should try another conversion tool. (Eg: Calibre often messes up PDF => LRF conversion really badly, the same file converted with BookDesigner is near perfect).