Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
No, I don't patch, so if this is an issue when people have been playing with the firmware like this, then I don't consider it a bug. Hopefully Kobo have tuned things to the best way. Plus, pushing the line spacing down like this could be hitting problems with small line heights in the actual fonts.
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I'm pretty sure it is caused by a bug in the Qt libraries used to render KePubs and text in the device GUI, because the same problem happened in the book synposis when Kobo lowered the line-height to 1em for some devices, and then went away again when they increased it to 1.4em.
The problem is noticed most my those who patch because one of the patches allows the line-height to be set below what Kobo normally allows to be set from the slider, however it can also be easily reproduced on stock firmware with built-in fonts by setting the line-height in the book's stylesheet in a way that prevents the line-spacing slider working. E.g.:
div.narrow { line-height: 0.75; }
<div class="narrow">... some text that crossed a page break, especially noticable in books translated from Nordic languages with character names like Åke or Åsa ...</div>
In actual books the line-height is commonly set to 1em for titles or lists such as the "other books by this author" page, and if the titles are seperated by <br/> instead of each in their own div and the list is long enough to need two pages then the problem can occur.
Edit: I think The worst effect of the bug on normal readers is not that they might on rare occasions encounter the problem reading a KePub, but that it prevents Kobo from extending the line-spacing slider to allow narrower settings. I would guess that quite a lot of normal people reading on Kobo devices have their line-spacing slider set at minimum, and if narrower settings were available they would use them, especially for some fonts such as Kobo Nickel. But Kobo won't allow narrower settings because they are trying to work-around the bug.