Quote:
Originally Posted by franklekens
I'm not sure I understand. I don't want to have to edit CSS for every book I read, I don't even know how to do that. I just want the reader to display a book the way it should be. That means that when there's paragraphs spanning several pages, the reader shouldn't suddenly decide to make one paragraph fill only half a screen.
If there's some CSS setting that causes this (and I wonder which fool ever created *that*), at least the GUI of the reader should have some option to ignore it. (Called, for user friendliness' sake, something like "don't split long paragraphs" or "don't bother about orphans widows".)
When I say the option was created by a fool, by the way, I mean I genuinely don't understand it. Orphans/widows are supposed to be a typographer's nightmare: an orphaned single line at the top of a page, oh no, we should prevent that!
Alright, I get that. Although I don't find it very troublesome myself.
But in this case the remedy is to have pages where the text suddenly stops half page, whereas the author has never intended for there to be even a blank line: as though *that* isn't a typographer's nightmare!
I really don't get it. I don't get why the bug is there, I don't get why nothing is being done about it, and I don't exactly get how I can remedy it myself. (Plus I don't really want to manually edit all my books.)
Guess I'm just clueless.
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You are confusing two things. The widows and orphans handling is completely unrelated to the long paragraph bug. The fact that long paragraphs (more than a screen of text at your current settings) get pushed to a new page rather than split in the right place has nothing to do with widows and orphans. For some reason everyone puts them into the same bucket and that just confuses things.
Why isn't this fixed? Because Kobo have decided there are more important things to do. It probably means it is harder to fix than you think and they fell the effort is better spent elsewhere. And I can see why. It was at least 10 months after I got my touch that I heard of the bug. Someone had to produce a test case to demonstrate it. Personally, I have only seen it in three books that I have read. So, were are talking less than 1% of the books that have read since getting an ereader. It is more common in the classics, so people who read those are more likely to see the problem. Yes, it should be fixed, but there have been more serious bugs that affected the reading experience that needed to be fixed first.
As to widows and orphans, Kobo have decided to respect the epub standards. And not just for this but for a lot of other style options. This mean that the books should be layed out how the author or designer decided it should be. If they decided there should be space between paragraphs and no idents, there will be. But if they decided to emulate most paper books and have no gaps with an indent, the book will be displayed that way. Unfortunately, most books don't have the widows and orphans set in the CSS so it falls back to the defaults. And that might not have been a great choice.
The style choices, or lack of choices, could be overridden by the ereader. But, that isn't as easy as it sounds. Potentially, each paragraph could have a different style and the formatting that gives to the book could be important. So which do you override? You could override the style on the body tag, but, the rest of the styles probably inherit from it and that could lead to a mess when reading.