Justification not working?

[peejayw]

I cannot see any change in the three justification settings, Off, Left or Left and Right. All my text is left and right justified.
Is this a known bug?
Thanks.

[PeterT]

It's not really a bug; it more has to do with how the ePubs have been created.

[buffaloseven]

Originally Posted by PeterT

It's not really a bug; it more has to do with how the ePubs have been created.

While I agree with you, it's ultimately a "bug" in the user interface. When it comes to ePub visual settings, it'd be nice if Kobo could do a little more work to surface/submerge settings that can be modified. If the Kobo sees style information in the ePub that's going to prevent the ability to change the text justification, they should either:

1. Override the ePub settings and use the user-selected setting. This would be the expected response from the user. Opening a new ePub would always default to the ePub styling (with "OFF" selected in the formatting menu for justification) for justification. IMO, the Kobo should always respect the user settings for font/font size/line spacing as these three settings have a direct and significant impact on the readability of a book.
2. Disable settings that the Kobo will not override. Disable the sliders and color them 50-60% lighter to convey the idea that the element is disabled.

It's great that the Kobo wants to respect the settings in the ePub, like you mentioned, but there's certainly a "bug" in the UI in that (as the fact this issue has been repeated several times over the past few months) it does not operate with expected behaviour. This is not a small problem and one area that Kobo should probably put a little more effort into.

Knowledge is power, though, and now that I've learned how to work around some of the more eccentric quirks of the Kobo Glo it's quickly become my favorite eReader.

And peejayw, using software such as Calibre or Sigil, you can modify your ePub files to remove the explicit setting of text justification to allow the Kobo settings to be applied.

[peejayw]

Originally Posted by buffaloseven

And peejayw, using software such as Calibre or Sigil, you can modify your ePub files to remove the explicit setting of text justification to allow the Kobo settings to be applied.

Thanks for the info. Looks like I need to dip my toe a bit deeper into Calibre
I just dont like the look of right justification.

[davidfor]

@buffaloseven: It is no where near as simple as that. In the epub, all these settings, justification font, margins and line spacing, are set in the styles. Different styles have different values for each. The styles should then be used in different places to help the reader see what is going on.

As an example, for most of a novel, justification doesn't matter. But, a fairly common thing in a novel to have a newspaper article, a letter or something else. These are generally displayed to make them appear different. The ways this is done changes, but it is some combination of a little space above and below, wider margins on both sides, a different font or all capitals and justification settings. For a newspaper article and the transcript of a hand written letter, different justification settings would be used, fully justified and left justified respectively. Using these gives a bit more information to the reader

If the device overrides these sort of setting, then the reader loses information about the book. The device could override some of the styles, but which ones? And if it disables the options in the settings dialog because one style has the setting hard-coded, that means the reader can't adjust the other parts that it is safe to adjust.

Personally, I think Kobo are close to right on this. They allow the user to make changes but respect the books hard-coded that might be important to the book. What we need is for the book designers/creators to create ebooks in such a way that readers can change settings for anywhere that the formatting isn't important.

[guma]

Originally Posted by peejayw

Thanks for the info. Looks like I need to dip my toe a bit deeper into Calibre
I just dont like the look of right justification.

It's easy enough in calibre:
conversion settings --> look and feel --> filter style information --> tick all the boxes --> convert
(This converts your epub into an epub where font and margins settings will be set by the reader).

But I agree that it would be preferable if the KOBO could just override css settings IF the user chooses to do so.

[buffaloseven]

Originally Posted by davidfor

@buffaloseven: It is no where near as simple as that. In the epub, all these settings, justification font, margins and line spacing, are set in the styles. Different styles have different values for each. The styles should then be used in different places to help the reader see what is going on.

As an example, for most of a novel, justification doesn't matter. But, a fairly common thing in a novel to have a newspaper article, a letter or something else. These are generally displayed to make them appear different. The ways this is done changes, but it is some combination of a little space above and below, wider margins on both sides, a different font or all capitals and justification settings. For a newspaper article and the transcript of a hand written letter, different justification settings would be used, fully justified and left justified respectively. Using these gives a bit more information to the reader

If the device overrides these sort of setting, then the reader loses information about the book. The device could override some of the styles, but which ones? And if it disables the options in the settings dialog because one style has the setting hard-coded, that means the reader can't adjust the other parts that it is safe to adjust.

Personally, I think Kobo are close to right on this. They allow the user to make changes but respect the books hard-coded that might be important to the book. What we need is for the book designers/creators to create ebooks in such a way that readers can change settings for anywhere that the formatting isn't important.

I completely agree with you. As a front-end designer, if I were approaching this problem, I'd tackle it one of two ways. Only override @page and body margins with the user-defined settings and:

1. Leave all others alone.
2. Add the custom margins to the user margins.

The first option could fail if an ePub is particularly poorly formatted (and ultimately, the lack of any real adopted standard for formatting eBooks is certainly one of the greatest challenges facing the industry) and possibly change no margins at all. The second option should work just fine, but in particularly high-margin blocks could really squeeze the text. If the device could dynamically set a maximum margin based on the font-size of each block of text, that would be ideal and you could set all the user-marigns you want, additive to the custom margins, without any awkwardly narrow columns of text.