Quote:
Originally Posted by Faterson
There is nothing to fix in my EPUBs (at least those I tried). They are hand-crafted by me, from w3c.org-validated HTML files. All the paragraphs have zero margins, there are no widows, orphans and such.  And, it wouldn't be worth the hassle for me, anyway. I buy e-reader devices for reading books on them, not to struggle with manually fixing the book files before reading them. 
I have no idea what 2.4, 2.5.2, etc., are. If you mean some internal Kobo Mini software, I have no clue -- after bringing Kobo Mini home from the store yesterday, unpacking it & running it for the first time, it offered to update its internal software via WiFi, which is what I did. I never connected it to my computer via the USB cable, because it just wasn't necessary (and that's great!). I side-loaded my EPUBs by downloading them from my SugarSync account, as mentioned. I could access the Dropbox (etc.) website in the same way directly on Kobo Mini. I love that feature! 
This, I mean the inefficient use of screen real-estate, is obviously a well-known bug of Kobo readers. I had known about it before buying Kobo Mini, because I had read quite a few expert/lengthy reviews complaining about this particular flaw. Even so, the benefits of the delightful form factor outweigh the nuisance that is that huge, empty (and even inconstant in height) bottom margin, so I went ahead and bought Kobo Mini. By the way, one customization feature I'm missing on Kobo Mini is the ability to adjust paragraph spacing in addition to line spacing.
In a primary e-reader of mine, a flaw like this (huge, empty botom margins) would be unacceptable, but because I'll only be using Kobo Mini occasionally (for long-distance travel, when running out of iPad/iPhone juice will be a constant threat), I can live with the flaw. Most of all, it's a software flaw on the part of Kobo Mini, so I hope it can perhaps be rectified in future by the makers of Kobo Mini, without me having to buy a new device to see the improvement.  |
Well, it's up to you. Kobo will impose its own waste-of-space formatting unless you set the formatting otherwise, in which case it will respect that. So you can decrease the line spacing, get rid of the paragraph spacing, reduce your bottom margin to zero (apart from the bar), all by setting up conversion settings in Calibre (this is a do-once affair), then running each book through an epub-epub conversion. I'm sure you could do it manually, if you prefer, but most of us don't
Calibre > Preference > Conversion > Common Options is the place to go. In Look & Feel, you can set your line height to your choice - I have mine on 110%. You can tick Remove Spacing Between Paragraphs, you can set you preferred Paragraph Indent and justification, you can filter out whatever style info floats your boat (not an issue for your handcrafted epubs), and you can add this in Extra CSS to deep-six Kobo's widows & orphans settings which give you those intermittent giant bottom margins:
p, body {
widows: 0;
orphans: 0;
}
Go out of Look & Feel and into Page Setup, and there you can set your margins.
And yep, I was talking firmware - if you poke around the Kobo forums, there are lots of discussions of this issue there. 2.5.1 and previous versions didn't have the top title header in sideloaded epubs; 2.5.2 foisted that on us. Downgrading to 2.5.1 would get rid of it for you.