Hacks CS/PW6: making the yellow bar bearable with KOReader

[BionicGecko]

Like many people who purchased a Colorsoft or PW6 around launch last year, my Colorsoft suffers from a bad case of the “yellow bar” at the bottom of the screen. After the replacement offered by Amazon turned out to be even worse than the original, I decided to just accept my fate, but never really managed to get used to it.

While there is no real fix, I did find a way to mitigate the issue with KOReader, and though I’d share my findings here, in the odd chance it might be useful to someone else. I'm posting in the general Kindle forum instead of the Developer's Corner, as every Kindle can be jailbroken at the moment, and this might be of interest to some people who would not otherwise consider jailbreaking their Kindle.

The trick is to make the bottom status bar wide enough to cover the yellow area, and change the background color of that bar to light grey. While it does not eliminate the yellowness, it does create a visual separation which makes it more bearable (at least to my eye; you can see it in action in the attached photo, keeping in mind that pictures of lit screens are often a poor representation of how they look in real life). The effect is likely very much psychological, but it works for me, and does allow me to actually enjoy my device instead of focusing on the defect on every page.

It is not possible to change the background color of the status bar via the KOReader interface. To do this, one must update the following line in the koreader/frontend/apps/reader/modules/readerfooter.lua file, from:

background = Blitbuffer.COLOR_WHITE,

to

background = Blitbuffer.COLOR_GRAY_D,

Other values are possible, from COLOR_GRAY_1 (almost black) to COLOR_GRAY_E (almost white). I found that COLOR_GRAY_D makes a good visual separation while keeping the status items legible. (Another approach would be to set the status bar background to black, but it requires also changing the color of the text, which is defined elsewhere, and is incompatible with dark mode as currently implemented, as the status bar would turn white in dark mode.)

The last step is to increase the size of the status bar to cover the yellow area. This can be done in the menus by adjusting the height and bottom margin until the text is satisfactorily positioned. the following values work for me:

Gear —> Status bar —> Configure items —> Height —> 70
Gear —> Status bar —> Configure items —> Bottom margin —> 10

I also enable the "Show status bar separator" option, as I think it helps making the bottom bar a conceptually separate area; of course the status bar can be further configured to one's liking in the normal way.

[mergen3107]

Cool trick!
Please keep mind that the color change will be reverted with the next KOReader update.

You might wanna ask devs on Github to make this color exposed to user settings, if you don’t wanna make this change after every update.

[BionicGecko]

Thanks mergen3107 for the warning and for the suggestion! I am a bit wary of bringing it up to the developers though, as I’m afraid a proper implementation would uncover a sizable devil in the details.

A setting to change the background color of a given section would require introducing another setting to change the text color for that section as well, as black text won’t show on darker backgrounds. And to make it really proper, it should be possible to disable the feature when in dark mode (which is basically implemented as a simple toggle for all the pixels); a dark background would become very bright, which is not desirable in the dark mode use case.

KOReader official updates come out three or four times a year, so for now I think I’ll just stick to updating that one file whenever I update; as long as it works anyway