Quote:
Originally Posted by OverHaze
The disparity between the rendering of epubs and Kepubs remains ridicules. There is no reason at all both can't be displayed equally well with the same features. If I download a book off of Project Gutenberg and upload it to my kindle it will be treated identically to any book I have bought from Amazons store. There is no reason the same should not be true for Kobo.
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While a Kindle uses a single renderer for all ebooks, Kobo ereaders use two different renderers. .epub ebooks are rendered by the Adobe RMDSK software which does allow compatibility with Adobe's ADEPT DRM but limits ebooks to epub2 compatibility while .kepub.epub ebooks are rendered by the ACCESS NetFront renderer which uses Kobo's proprietary DRM and enables the use of epub3 features. Epub3 features, by the way, are pretty much a necessity in the Japanese market if you are going to handle Japanese typography oddities such as furigana, text can be written top to bottom, right to left or text written using 4 different character sets while remaining standards compliant.
I would suspect when the Adobe RMDSK is close to being fully epub3 compliant (Datalogic's RMDSK 10 release has moved quite a ways towards that point though they seem to concentrate more on hyping it's hardened DRM
), Kobo will return to a single renderer.
Given the problems that various implementors have in making web pages render identically -- try looking at many web pages in IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc, you are asking a bit much to have two renderers supporting different standards give identical results.
Regards,
David