I've noticed that the "time to finish the book" indeed widely varies, and it isn't particularly accurate. However, being able to see e.g. relative chapter length with a visualization is something I do find helpful, and that's kepub only, too.
I'm curious: what in particular is making you all say RMSDK has better typesetting? To clarify: I happen to agree, but I'm curious if there are things that I haven't noticed myself.
I'm asking because I'm trying to tackle as many rendering issues/deficiencies as technically possible with
the mod I'm working on. In particular, so far, I've found it's possible to address the following:
A.
Hyphenation, ligature rendering. This is not new: you set the WebKit rendering mode to
optimizeLegibility but it causes two annoying problems (that I know of):
(1) vertical text has issues w/ CJK text
(2) text justification is broken
As far as I can tell, these weren't really fixable before. It took me some time, but I was able to address those bugs with my mod. IMO, enabling
optimizeLegibility fixes much of what I'd call the deficient text rendering Kobos ship out of the box with, i.e. in terms of tracking, kerning, ligatures, etc. (A type designer actually pointed out the horrible tracking to me when I provided them with a screenshot of their typeface on my device.)
B.
Text outline quality (my personal pet peeve)
This is the one I mentioned earlier in the thread that I was working on. I did quite a bit of reverse engineering to track down what was causing what people have reported as "wobbly text" in the kepub renderer for certain fonts, especially at smaller text sizes, where the renderer appears to "snap" certain text to specific pixels.
What the renderer outputs in terms of text rendering (outlines) now is quite close to what KOReader outputs, from what I can tell. KOReader, too, ignores type hints and just renders the outlines as-is by default (you do have a setting).
Anyway, once the mod is properly finalized (likely over the next few days) the plan is to integrate it as an optional-but-on-by-default mod for KoboPatch Web UI.
If anyone wants to try the mod -- feedback is always welcome! (I've tested that it works on my Clara BW, Libra Colour and Libra 2.)
EDIT: Now available on the preview website!