Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
Or, due the large number of complaints about the text not filling the screen, Kobo decided not to support widows and orphans in their format. That is a reasonable decision on their part as they are the ones who own the format.
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Of course Kobo can do whatever they want with their propietary and "undisclosed" format, but that's not a reasonable decision. No matter how you look at it.
- Kobo has a problem about large white areas on footer and header because they want. Their interface is not really optimized.
- Of course widows and orphans cause the white space at the bottom to be bigger. I don't know in Canada/USA/English world, but in Spain we have an idiom that says "You cannot make an omelette without breaking the eggs". I think it's self-explanatory.
- With normal settings (value of 2) the biggest blank space is created by a three line paragraph. And it involves just two blank lines. So please, Kobo, let me chose if I prefer UGLY lonely lines or if I prefer a not-so-ugly 2 line blank space, (IMO but other people can prefer the first option). If you don't properly support widows and orphans, I cannot chose...
- And nevertheless, you have a proprietary renderer, so please if you consider that that blank space is ugly, (more over in addition to your poorly designed huge footer), code other ways of dealing with it. It's your renderer, you are not in Adobe's hands like you are with the stupid long paragraph bug which has been present and not solved for years.
- The easiest solution: just perform a vertical centering when your text covers the full page and has been cut by the widows and orphans settings. Or even better, I agree that if your font size is so huge that you only have room for 10 lines per page, a blank space of two lines is horrible no matter what you do. Therefore, perform that vertical centering only when the font size & interline space settings allow more than XX lines per page, and disable widows and orphans when you have less than XX lines per page.
- On a side note: you have a perfect working format (ePub) which has it flaws or whatever, but which works reasonably well and it's the industry standard. And then you create your own "enhancement" over it, and you start dropping features instead of adding new ones?!?!?! (page-break-whatever is another example). Are you, (Kobo crew), nuts?
David, I do really prefer thinking that this issue with widows and orphans, (and the lack of support for nested items in ToC as another example), is somehow a "bug", or a "work in progress", or a "side effect", or a "something we didn't think of". Because the opposite way, (that they are fully conscious design criteria), would tell reaaaaaally bad things about the intelligence of the designers which work for Kobo...