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gwpartis · 06-13-2014, 09:16 PM

I use a Kobo Mini and an Ipad to read books and found that books which display correctly on the Ipad sometimes display only half a screenful of text or less on my Kobo. By accident I found a way round the problem which involves a bit of work but gives good results so far.

A lot of my ebooks were originally text files or RTF files which I converted to epub format by saving them as Word files then using Aspose Words Express, a freeware tool, to convert the Word file to epub. This tends to produce an epub file littered with thousands of and tags in the most awkward places. Normally I use Sigil, another freeware tool, to edit out the tags with Search and Replace.

I accidentally loaded one file onto my Kobo without removing the tags and found examples of first letters of a word on one line with the remaining letters on the next line, quotation marks split from the text they were supposed to surround and words containing apostrophes split between lines. The incidents seemed to coincide with the span tags. The Kobo was treating the tags almost as a line break.

This set me thinking and after clearing out the span tags I inserted new ones where I wanted. I inserted after each tag and before each . After each full stop space and comma space combination I entered . (Using Search and Replace in Sigil I made all the changes in a 560 page book in about five minutes.)

I then loaded the epub onto my Kobo where I had another copy of the epub with no span tags at all.

I found a place on my Kobo where the file with no span tags missed out half a screenful of text because the next paragraph was so long, moved to the same location in the file with my corrected span tags and found the problem had gone. Moving through the book I found that some pages showed only one or two blank lines at the bottom of the screen, many showed no blank lines. So far I have found none with a large number of blank lines. It isn't a perfect fix but I find it acceptable.

The only reason I can think of for why it works is that the span tags break up long paragraphs into smaller paragraphs and spacing the span tags as I did ensures that no words are split in two. I hope others find this useful.

06-13-2014, 09:16 PM	#20
gwpartis Junior Member Posts: 1 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jun 2014 Device: Kobo Mini	I use a Kobo Mini and an Ipad to read books and found that books which display correctly on the Ipad sometimes display only half a screenful of text or less on my Kobo. By accident I found a way round the problem which involves a bit of work but gives good results so far. A lot of my ebooks were originally text files or RTF files which I converted to epub format by saving them as Word files then using Aspose Words Express, a freeware tool, to convert the Word file to epub. This tends to produce an epub file littered with thousands of <span> and </span> tags in the most awkward places. Normally I use Sigil, another freeware tool, to edit out the tags with Search and Replace. I accidentally loaded one file onto my Kobo without removing the tags and found examples of first letters of a word on one line with the remaining letters on the next line, quotation marks split from the text they were supposed to surround and words containing apostrophes split between lines. The incidents seemed to coincide with the span tags. The Kobo was treating the tags almost as a line break. This set me thinking and after clearing out the span tags I inserted new ones where I wanted. I inserted <span> after each <p> tag and </span> before each </p>. After each full stop space and comma space combination I entered </span><span>. (Using Search and Replace in Sigil I made all the changes in a 560 page book in about five minutes.) I then loaded the epub onto my Kobo where I had another copy of the epub with no span tags at all. I found a place on my Kobo where the file with no span tags missed out half a screenful of text because the next paragraph was so long, moved to the same location in the file with my corrected span tags and found the problem had gone. Moving through the book I found that some pages showed only one or two blank lines at the bottom of the screen, many showed no blank lines. So far I have found none with a large number of blank lines. It isn't a perfect fix but I find it acceptable. The only reason I can think of for why it works is that the span tags break up long paragraphs into smaller paragraphs and spacing the span tags as I did ensures that no words are split in two. I hope others find this useful.