[davidfor]

Originally Posted by arspr

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.

If you look around, there are plenty of comments that people want the headers and footers. Personally, I want the footer but not the header. I do thing that they could be smaller, but

• 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.

Yes, it is their renderer so they made decisions about who to do the rendering. And they disagree with you. They looked at all the comments here and elsewhere about wasted space and the amount of effort spent in explaining widows and orphans and decided to take the simple action of ignoring them.

• 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.

I really don't like the idea of that. I really hope that Kobo don't see this as an idea. Maybe it would look OK, but I also don't think it would be any point in doing.

Oh, and think of all the posts here if it was implemented: "The line spacing changes from one page to the next" or "It ignores the line height I have set in the CSS". That last one sounds familiar.

• 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?

Probably because they think they can make more money that way. And maybe they thought they could do things better if they had more control.

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...

I really don't know. I think it is more likely a deliberate decision than a simple bug. But, it might have been a decision to change to use 1 as the default instead of the previous default of 2 or 3, and they messed up the implementation.