[davidfor]

Originally Posted by masterz87

I already have the following css in the book.
I just added widows:0 and orphans:0 to the body property that was already part of the epub I had purchased but it's doing _nothing_ to reduce the bottom bar spacing thing. Top bar is removed, but I was trying to reduce the amount of wasted lines at the bottom as right now it looks like it's got ~3-5 lines between the bottom of the book and the "status" bar thing. I like having page number at the bottom but would like to reduce the wasted lines some.

Have you checked it there are any other margins? Such as on an @page.

And the gap is between the top of the bottom bar and the text. So tap the screen to bring up the bottom bar to show the line. The text can go down to just above the line.

body {
	-epub-hyphens:auto;
	-webkit-hyphens:auto;
	widows:0;
	orphans:0;
}

The widows and orphans doesn't affect the amount of space used unless a paragraph goes over the end of the screen. And, you should set them to "1". That is the minimum in the specs and

for some reason kobo also hates line-height aka space between the lines. I have tried modifying the line-height from the standard x.yza it doesn't do % nor em but it's perfectly valid css it's not letting me increase the spacing for some unknown reason.

The firmware definitely respects the line-height. And it can be in % or em. I clean-up a book the other day that used % for everything including line-height at something like 10%. That gave some very interesting effects. But, I usually remove line-height for normal text and only leave if for headings and other places where the spacing might be important.

Have you checked there are no errors in the CSS? If you are using the epub renderer, and there are errors, the complete stylesheet will be ignored.