Thread: Some serious issues with kepubs
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Old 05-08-2013, 08:16 AM   #46
davidfor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Anak View Post
I've explored it a bit further.
FYI: the pictures in the first post are taken from an original kobo kepub and epub with drm. The kepub has the mentioned issues.

So I decided to
1. remove the drm of the epub and renamed this epub to .kepub.epub to force it to use the Kobo renderer (NetFront BookReader engine) instead of Adobes RMSDK. THe result: the kepub is rendered exactly as the original epub. All centered text is displayed as such and the margin between each sentence is gone. The deliberate blank lines (like "scene breaks") are properly displayed.
2. but just renaming a epub to .kepub.epub may not unlock all special Kobo features (or make these work correctly) like annotations. But that is outside the scope of problems I mentioned in the first post.
But with just renaming the epub to kepub.epub I was able to change the font size, line spacing, margins (page margins left and right) and justification (default epub setting, left, justify). So the orginal epub was not "hard coded" that prevents to change any or some of these settings.

The overall conclusion is that not the NetFront BookReader engine causes the mentioned layout issues but the Kobo wrapper code.
The code below is from a different book as I can not download a preview of a book that I allready own.
The kobo.css is actually an empty css without any code. In some older book previews the kobo.css can contain code. That code is identical to inline css code added to every single xhtml file (<style type="text/css" id="kobostylehacks"> part) and making the kobo.css obsolete.
Apparently, my experience with the epub and kepub versions of books is different from yours. When I open a kepub and it has crappy formatting, the epub is usually as bad. The current book I am reading, used about four different font and sizes for the paragraphs, cycling through them. The started reading the kepub and swapped to the epub and found it was just as bad.

I have found this for most of the books I have bought from Kobo. But, there have been a few where one format was noticeably better. In most cases, possibly all but I don't remember, it was the epub that was better. I can think of two reasons for this. For older books, the kepub converter might have had problems and messed up the formatting. And Kobo have reconverted these.

But, I think the main reason is that the epub was supplied to Kobo had bad formatting. Kobo converted this to kepub and carried the bad formatting with it. Maybe with some extra errors due to GIGO. I think the next step in this is that the epub was fixed. Then it was supplied to Kobo again, but it wasn't sent through the kepub converter. I know that some books have been updated due to complaints made. Some have also been withdrawn because they were so bad, though I think those were missing text rather than just bad formatting.

The thing to do is to complain to Kobo about the book. They do fix them, but it can take time. If the epub version is good, that should make it faster.
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