H20 justification issue

[TheSmitty]

Forgive me as I am not sure which forum to post this in. I have a book that I transferred from kindle to my H20 using Calibre.

One problem I see is that I cannot change the justification of the book on the H20. It always stays set with right justification. On the kindle you can switch it back and forth to what you want.
Am I missing something?

[JSWolf]

Edit the eBook in the Calibre editor. Remove all text-align: left; from the CSS. In the body CSS, add in text-align: justify; See the body CSS style that you should add in or replace body with.

body {
  widows: 1;
  orphans: 1;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  margin-left: 0;
  text-align: justify;
}

[DNSB]

You might also want to check the entire CSS stylesheet(s) for "text-align:" and remove any text-align: right that apply to body paragraphs. My habit is to remove all text-align justify or left allowing me to use the ereader's menu to select while leaving center and right. In your case, it appears the normal body paragraph has right alignment set.

BTW, I am assuming that by right justification, you mean the text is flush to the right margin and the left side of the text is ragged.

[TheSmitty]

I may have described it incorrectly. The text is aligned left along the margin. Any the right is aligned along the margin there. As opposed to jagged on the right side. Hope that makes sense.

[hobnail]

If you want it ragged / jagged on the right, straight on the left, then in calibre change the conversion settings so that Text Justification is Left align. The first image is in your global Preferences, under Conversion, Common Options. This affects all books from now on. The second one is where you can change it for the book you're converting, and those changes will stick, for just that book.

Then delete the book from your ereader, convert it again, then send it to your ereader. Before you send it to your ereader you can tap the V key and preview it with calibre.

I don't know what happens when you try to convert a book and the output format is already there. But to be safe you can right click on the Remove books button and select Remove Files of a Specific Format From Selected Books and remove the epub, before you convert it again.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

I may have described it incorrectly. The text is aligned left along the margin. Any the right is aligned along the margin there. As opposed to jagged on the right side. Hope that makes sense.

That sounds more like the text is justified. Left aligned gives ragged right and right aligned gives ragged left. Centered, not to be left, out gives ragged left and right.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

I may have described it incorrectly. The text is aligned left along the margin. Any the right is aligned along the margin there. As opposed to jagged on the right side. Hope that makes sense.

Hyphenation does not work with left justified text.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Hyphenation does not work with left justified text.

And left justified text does not give rivers which I personally find very annoying.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And left justified text does not give rivers which I personally find very annoying.

I'm sure if I'd been using fully justified up to now and tried left justified I'd hate the left justified. But I learned about the advantages of left justified decades ago. There are some times a large space at the end of a sentence where it could have hyphenated a big word but I hardly notice it any more. Whereas those big space between words drive me nuts.

[TheSmitty]

Thanks for all the responses.

Other books I have from Kindle and moved to Kobo do not have the problem. The common denominator is that the one that allow me to successfully change the justification are Kobo epub. The books that do not allow changing of the justification are just epubs. How I have some in one format or another is a mystery at the moment.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by TheSmitty

Thanks for all the responses.

The books that do not allow changing of the justification are just epubs.

For being able to change the justification on plain epubs you'll need to roll up your sleeves and dig into the book's css. In the css find and delete all lines that say

text-align: left;

or

text-align: justify;

If they say center or right, leave those alone. The text-align:justify is the more likely one. Find all occurances and delete them.

With the kobo, if there is neither a text-align:justify nor a text-align:left then you can change how it displays with the ereader's setting. Otherwise, either one forces it.

At worst there might even be

style="text-align: justify;"

in the html on the p tags; delete those as well.

Another avenue to try, and perhaps the easiest one, is to use the Kobo extended driver plugin for Calibre. It changes an epub to a Kobo epub (called kepub on these forums) on the fly when it sends the ebook to your ereader. See its page in the Calibre plugins section here.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

And left justified text does not give rivers which I personally find very annoying.

That's why I created a better hyphenation dictionary as Kobo's default settings are all wrong 5 is just way too large and leaves way too many gaps.

[PapaQuebec]

Actually, while you incredibly generous guys have been taking the time to reply to me I went into the edit menu, chose the CSS that showed me two font sizes were in use - 1.125EM and 0.75EM and changed them both to 1.125EM , saved and exited and copied the file to a spare Kindle PW3 - there is still a very slight difference in the pars but the difference is less than a point (as a former Journalist I tend to think in points - an EM and an EN were measures of width)

I'll play with this some more, but thanks guys (and gals) you've certainly pointed me in the right direction!!