Now that I've actually slept after being awake for two days, I'm a Hank more lucid about my impressions of the patch.
The patch seems to achieve its primary advantage -- additional text onscreen -- by shifting the placement of the text, which has pronounced aesthetic drawbacks. In particular, I'm dismayed by the lack of space between kepub footers and the bottom of the screen, as opposed to the crushing blankness afforded the headers far above. Changing the size and height of the font seems not to affect the footers' basic placement.
What's interesting is that the patch's modification of kepub footers seems to need to load at first. When I rebooted initially, I was dismayed to see footers with asymmetries and amputations -- lone dashes on one side of the page numbers, odd fonts and missing text. This righted itself when I closed certain books and opened them again. I now see the word
Loading occasionally before the page numbers appear as intended -- but, unfortunately, with chapter designations omitted.
All of this seems to make the response of my Aura HD a wee Tad slower; the activation of various book-constrained menus in the header and footer areas, a Scott bit quirkier.
People have expressed their delight at no longer finding odd page breaks in books -- a problem which is of course specific to Kobo firmware. However, with the patch, that issue seems to be replaced with endless orphans and widows.
It looks as though the infamous Kobo bug is really the side-effect of Kobo's attempt to avoid widows and orphans. I don't recall seeing many widows in the past, but now every introduction or chapter in a novel -- or individual letter in a collection of correspondence -- seems to end with one.
I also wonder why it would be desirable to have Wifi that didn't disable itself after some Wifi-specific task. Keeping it on merely drains the battery. I prefer it to shut off automatically once I've synced my library or downloaded a new book, which is what my Aura did before the patch.
For these reasons, I've decided keep two versions of the tgz file -- one which enables whatever features entailing drawbacks that become annoying over time, and another that restores the original settings on the device (which also involve annoying drawbacks).
The second file was created as per the instructions in the original blog entry:
Quote:
How to remove a personal patch (returning the Reader to its original "factory" settings):
Replace the previous instructions to paragraph 4: "4. Any file with a text editor, do kpg.conf empty (or comment out all lines in it)." and execute it.
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-- which Anak's suggestion accomplishes:
Quote:
To revert the patched settings all you have to do is change
Code:
patch_enable = `yes`
into
Code:
patch_enable = `no`
and reapply the patch.
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The last thing I might do before abandoning the patch (for the moment) is to try version 6. The giant bottom margins using stock look especially irritating now that I've played with version 7.