Like many people who purchased a Colorsoft or PW6 around launch last year, my Colorsoft suffers from a bad case of the “
yellow bar” at the bottom of the screen. After the replacement offered by Amazon turned out to be even worse than the original, I decided to just accept my fate, but never really managed to get used to it.
While there is no real fix, I did find a way to mitigate the issue with KOReader, and though I’d share my findings here, in the odd chance it might be useful to someone else. I'm posting in the general Kindle forum instead of the Developer's Corner, as every Kindle can be jailbroken at the moment, and this might be of interest to some people who would not otherwise consider jailbreaking their Kindle.
The trick is to make the bottom status bar wide enough to cover the yellow area, and change the background color of that bar to light grey. While it does not eliminate the yellowness, it does create a visual separation which makes it more bearable (at least to my eye; you can see it in action in the attached photo, keeping in mind that pictures of lit screens are often a poor representation of how they look in real life). The effect is likely very much psychological, but it works for me, and does allow me to actually enjoy my device instead of focusing on the defect on every page.
It is not possible to change the background color of the status bar via the KOReader interface. To do this, one must update the following line in the
koreader/frontend/apps/reader/modules/readerfooter.lua file, from:
Code:
background = Blitbuffer.COLOR_WHITE,
to
Code:
background = Blitbuffer.COLOR_GRAY_D,
Other values are possible, from
COLOR_GRAY_1 (almost black) to
COLOR_GRAY_E (almost white). I found that
COLOR_GRAY_D makes a good visual separation while keeping the status items legible. (Another approach would be to set the status bar background to black, but it requires also changing the color of the text, which is defined elsewhere, and is incompatible with dark mode as currently implemented, as the status bar would turn white in dark mode.)
The last step is to increase the size of the status bar to cover the yellow area. This can be done in the menus by adjusting the height and bottom margin until the text is satisfactorily positioned. the following values work for me:
Gear —> Status bar —> Configure items —> Height —> 70
Gear —> Status bar —> Configure items —> Bottom margin —> 10
I also enable the "Show status bar separator" option, as I think it helps making the bottom bar a conceptually separate area; of course the status bar can be further configured to one's liking in the normal way.