Missing spaces in chapter titles (sideloaded books only)

[nikosan]

I wasn't 100% sure the best place to post this, but since this is an issue that's showing up on my Kobo, I decided to start here.


In my sideloaded books, if a chapter title has a colon in it, the space after the colon is removed from the in-book header where it shows the chapter title. So instead of saying "Chapter 1: Title" it looks like "Chapter 1:Title". This issue also shows up in the footer menu's table of contents, but not in the ToC in the book itself. I've also checked the "Edit ToC" interface in Calibre, and that doesn't show any missing spaces either.

Any idea what could be causing this?

If it helps, here's one of the sideloaded ebooks (scrambled): sideloaded - author.epub

[Aleron Ives]

If I'm not mistaken, there's a bug in the current KTE driver that causes spaces to be stripped out. The solution is to downgrade to a previous version and then resend all the books that got corrupted.

[DNSB]

Sorry but looking at the nav.xhtml and TableofContents.html files, the spaces between the : and the rest of the header are present. If I generate a toc.ncx from the nav.xhtml, the spaces are still there.

Sadly, I can't see the header since it was replaced by Scrambled

From the presence of the koboSpan in the TableofContents.html, it looks as if this was either an ePub that was converted to kepub or an ebook downloaded from Kobo that was not properly cleaned. If you are sending this book to your Sage using the KoboTouchExtended driver, there are issues with losing spaces. I would suggest reverting to v3.7.0 from the Releases on GitHub

nav.xhtml

    <li><a href="OEBPS/Text/section-0012.html#auto_bookmark_toc_top">Vebbkjh 6: Yty Ldetzrva Ace Yjkv'd Teyq</a></li>

TableofContents.html

  <p class="P_TOC_Entry_1"><a href="../Text/section-0012.html"><span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="koboSpan">Xagtdro 7: Rvw Lvbyonio Ojk Vdsn'c Mfgx</span></a></p>

toc.ncx

  <navPoint id="navPoint13">
    <navLabel>
      <text>Vebbkjh 6: Yty Ldetzrva Ace Yjkv'd Teyq</text>
    </navLabel>
    <content src="../Text/section-0012.html#auto_bookmark_toc_top" />
  </navPoint>

[nikosan]

Unfortunately I'm already using KTE 3.7.0, so it's not a problem with the plugin.

I just discovered that if I use Kobo Utilities' "Update ToC for Selected Books" function to update the ToC on the device, it fixes the issue... Which I suppose is an acceptable workaround, but it does add an extra step I'll need to remember whenever I send sideloaded books... Wish I could figure out what the actual issue is!

[rashkae]

It was an interesting sample to look at thank you. One thing to note about this file is that it is a pure epub3 file that only has nav.xhtml and no backwards compatible toc.ncx file. This is probably very rare, as most commercially available books will have the toc.ncx. Converting to epub3 in calibre is the only time I've seen a book without.

When sending the books to Kobo with KTE, the nav.xhtml gets processed to add kobo spans. A serious question needs to be asked... should it? In theory, the file can be added to the spine to be viewable as part of book content, so probably yes.

Even with the Kobo spans, the spaces *are* preserved, but get filtered out by Kobo when creating it's internal Table of Contents. This is, alas, a bug in the Kobo firmware, but it is only exposed when adding the spans in the TOC file. (Ie, if you rename the original epub to .kepub.epub and copy to the device manually, the TOC preserves spaces properly.)

Edit: As an experiment, I *did* add the nav.xhtml to the spine of book and confirmed that it displays properly with spaces, but the TOC still looses them.

Edit 2: As another experiment, I added a toc.ncx file. But when sending as Kepub, the Kobo still generated it's toc from the nav.xhtml file and did not display the spaces. At this point, I will need to download an epub3 file to Kobo Desktop and decrypt it to see if it handles the nav file differently.

[nikosan]

Really appreciate all the sleuthing, rashkae, thank you!

Originally Posted by rashkae

It was an interesting sample to look at thank you. One thing to note about this file is that it is a pure epub3 file that only has nav.xhtml and no backwards compatible toc.ncx file. This is probably very rare, as most commercially available books will have the toc.ncx. Converting to epub3 in calibre is the only time I've seen a book without.

Shoot, yeah, I did convert it to ePUB3 via Calibre... I didn't think it would hurt anything to do that, but it sounds like that's where my issue started?

Originally Posted by rashkae

Edit 2: As another experiment, I added a toc.ncx file. But when sending as Kepub, the Kobo still generated it's toc from the nav.xhtml file and did not display the spaces. At this point, I will need to download an epub3 file to Kobo Desktop and decrypt it to see if it handles the nav file differently.

On a whim, I downloaded the Kobo preview of the book I had sideloaded -- it looks like it still has the full ToC despite not having all of the actual content. Does this offer any more insight re: how I might fixed the books I've already converted?

scrambled - Unknown.epub

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by nikosan

On a whim, I downloaded the Kobo preview of the book I had sideloaded -- it looks like it still has the full ToC despite not having all of the actual content. Does this offer any more insight re: how I might fixed the books I've already converted?

Attachment 212818

You can just convert them back to Epub2.. easy peasy. Should fix it right up.
When converting, on the Epub Output tab, Change Epub version to 2

[LordP]

I see that KoboTouchExtended is up to 3.7.3 - does anyone know if the problem was solved?

Not trying to rush anyone, just unsure how to tell if it's fixed.

[PeterT]

No.The 3.7.3 is just 3.7.0 with a new version number. (If you'd just go the calibre / plugins forum you could have found this)

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by LordP

I see that KoboTouchExtended is up to 3.7.3 - does anyone know if the problem was solved?

Not trying to rush anyone, just unsure how to tell if it's fixed.

Wrong thread. While a neat coincidence that this was brought up at the same time as the bug with KTE, this is not in any way related.