Thread: getting monospace font to work correctly with KoboTouchExtended driver?
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Old 05-03-2017, 01:19 PM   #8
TuxGirl
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Posts: 179
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Device: kindle
Quote:
Originally Posted by jackie_w View Post
This is due to a recent change in the firmware. I suspect it's just Kobo trying to standardise the appearance of all their drop-down menus to display entries as italic. Personally, I think it looks a bit weird on the font-family drop-down but, same as you, I can live with it.

As for your monospace problem ... welcome to the wonderful world of epub versus kepub

Although I've been using Kobos for years I didn't bother with kepubs at all until I got my KA1. Once I decided to give them a try it became clear how different they are when it comes to style issues (monospace, sans-serif, small-caps, hyphenation, ligatures and footnotes).

For kepubs, styling as monospace is actually easier in some ways than it is for epubs because all that's required is to change the CSS from font-family:monospace to font-family:"Courier New" (if "Courier New" is your chosen sideloaded monospace font) rather than needing to add @font-face statements. The obvious problem being that this requires manually editing every book which uses monospace.

This would be time-consuming but, worse than that, making these changes to your master epub in calibre would almost certainly be counter-productive if you also want to send the master epub to a different device, e.g. Android, or even if you change your mind and decide that standard epubs are preferable for the Kobo.

I did solve this conundrum for myself by customising my personal copy of the KoboTouchExtended plugin driver to make the necessary CSS changes on-the-fly during the calibre send-to-device process. This is obviously not an option for everyone but if you have some Python coding skills it's possible to do all sorts of interesting (OK, I'm a nerd ) stuff on-the-fly. Should you ever choose to go down this route feel free to PM me. I'm happy to share anything you'd find useful.

Python is not one of my stronger languages (I'm more a Java girl), but editing the plugin driver does sound like something I could manage! I will PM you, and would love to hear more about what you did with this!
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