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Originally Posted by Chris Jones
How exactly did you convert your epub to kepub? I've tried different approaches and the kepub… result is always the same. The Kobo displays a blank page… waits a couple of seconds… flashes twice… and then I get the five black squares… presumably to let me know the application has crashed and it's rebooting. After what feels like perhaps one minute or so the Kobo displays the Home screen. If I try a second time etc. it takes me through the same motions.
Maybe I misunderstood something about how you're supposed to do the conversion via Calibre?
My understanding was that once the KoboExtendedTouch plugin was active the conversion was done on the fly while transferring the book… leaving the epub version in Calibre untouched and copying a kepub.epub version of the book to the device.
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No, you haven't misunderstood. The KoboExtendedTouch will do an on-the-fly conversion when you send the books. But, in this particular case, I just renamed the file. Changing the extension to ".kepub.epub" is enough for it to be treated as a kepub. And for a one or two page test case, or to do a quick check, it works well. But, if you are reading a book, you need the conversion so that the reading position and bookmarks are maintained properly.
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What would be "big"? The file is 1.3M in size… the Adobe numbers tell me there are 1132 pages and as to the (nested) ToC it has three levels and approx. 800 nodes.
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I would expect that to trigger the bug. The problem, I believe, is that when you first open a kepub, it does a word count for each ToC entry and stores it in the database. This is used as you read for the chapter graph in the in-book stats (my favourite thing about kepubs). But, this takes time and the bigger the ToC, the longer. But, there is a process watcher called sickel that will trigger a reboot if a process appears to be hung. What I believe is happening is that the word counting is taking to long and sickel triggers a reboot. For all my test cases, when I try to open the book again, it work. So I think that in the first attempt, enough of the counts have been done and stored that on the next attempt it finishes and the book opens.
I would suggest creating a smaller sample book with only a couple of chapters so you can see what it looks like.
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You were right about having doubts about this. Not only does it fail to recognize links to other files… but even links to another part of the same file do not work. I dumped my inline ToC entries right at the beginning or the <body> of the single file that contains the <style> definitions together with the html markup and the text and the inline table of contents does show up at the beginning of the book on the Kobo… with the letters in some shade of medium gray instead of black… but whatever I try with entries… press… long press… nothing happens. Of course I had verified in a web browser that my ToC entries were functional prior to transferring the book.
As a matter of fact support of text/html file appears to be… rather incomplete. Another example: I tried to do a search via the icon at the top right of the screen selecting "Current Read" in the pull-down menu of options and that does not do what you'd expect… It runs the search against… the Kobo User Manual instead…!
Yet another thing that does not work as expected is that the CSS classes I defined for first and second level titles specify "text-align:center" but this property is not correctly rendered. These titles show up either left-aligned or justified (left+right) with many spaces in between the words. Even though this works fine in Firefox, Chrome, or Readium…
I thought that perhaps Kobo's renderer found something wrong either with my classes or the html markup… and was just silently ignoring my definitions… Just in case… I ran the usual validation tools against my file and got no errors.
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It's been a long time since I tried a HTML file, so I just tried a couple. Firstly, they don't seem to like links to local other files. I tried a few things and none worked. A link to a web page will prompt you to open it in the browser. Not sure about the CSS. Other parts of the display suggest the HTML file is displayed using the kepub renderer. If so, it might only use the CSS that the kepub does. But, I'm surprised that anything you had in an epub didn't work here.
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Anyway, if you can spare the time and give me step by step instructions on how you exactly do the kepub conversion… I'll give it one more try and move on.
Perhaps open a ticket with Kobo if that's at all possible..?
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I always recommend reporting bugs and problems to the people responsible for them. There is link on Kobo's help page to report problems. As to how likely something is to happen, it really depends on how it fits with what they are doing. Some things get fixed quickly, others take a long time. But, if they don't know it's a problem for their users, they won't do anything.