[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by QuietShelfLife

Got the rendering report, thanks - that's exactly what I need to dig into this properly.

You're right on all counts. Here's what's happening under the hood:

Widows/orphans: The app defaults to widows: 2, orphans: 2 on all paragraphs. For short paragraphs (2-3 lines), that effectively means they can't split across pages at all - the engine pushes the whole paragraph to the next page rather than leaving a single line behind. That's where the white space is coming from. Dropping to 1/1 would fix the worst of it, and making it a user setting is the right move.

The CSS is specifying widows and orphans of 1. So that should not be an issue. This means that the app is not respecting the CSS properly,

Line height: Default is 1.6 when the book doesn't specify one. Too generous for a lot of books - especially ones with already-loose paragraph spacing. No user control for this yet, which is the real problem.

When no line height is specified, you just go with whatever the font gives you You do not specify any line height amount.

Margins: Left/right are fixed at 40px on macOS. Should be adjustable.

Yes, they should be adjustable but they are not. Please add this in.

All of this points to the same gap: the reader needs a proper typography settings panel - line height, margins, widows/orphans, font selection beyond the theme presets, custom font loading. I've been tracking most of these as feature requests already, but your report makes it clear they need to move up the priority list.

I agree that these things need to be top priority in order to be readable. As it is, it's not readable at all.

I'll start with widows/orphans (quickest win for readability) and line height. Will post here when there's a build to test.

Thanks. Please don't specify any line height when there isn't one. Let the font do the work. Then when you have a line height adjustment make it so it goes lower then 1 and higher then one but don't make the increments too large.