[se1961]

Yes, the TTS is broken! I have exchanged a number of emails about the usability problems, which are NUMEROUS. Why do I use it? Because the TTS is breath-taking, often indistinguishable from a real person, reading. Except the TTS currently is engineered to treat any white space as a paragraph break, and that seems to be just baked in.

I have been fussing with this a little bit today, and have discovered that the problem occurs when the software (Natural Reader Online, by the way) imports my ePub-- it automatically converts the ePub into a PDF, and makes a number of bad UI choices-- fonts that look tinier than a list of sunscreen ingredients on my iPhone, and hard page breaks, among others.

I just created a dummy PDF, by taking a long word document and setting it to "keep lines together" as default behavior for the Normal style, setting extremely wide margins and using 20pt as the default text size and then printing to PDF. I discovered to my joy that when I imported this PDF into Natural Reader it was not changed, so the font was big enough to read on my phone, and only VERY occasionally was a paragraph too long for the page.

I am now hoping that if I could get the settings right, I could convert my books straight to PDF in Calibre-- with huge fonts and "keep paragraph lines together" and a page size that would work for an iPhone.... Is such a thing possible? If so, might you have a suggestion about the best margins/font size for phone reading? If not, might you have an idea about another workflow that would do the trick? Could I, for example, convert to html in calibre, import the whole thing into word and do my formatting there...? Or....?

I may sound bonkers, but I would be so grateful to solve this problem. I can't tell you how great the listening experience is, and I LONG for a listening/reading experience that will free me from Kindle/Audible, especially since I can't bear most audiobooks, which are (imho) over-performed....