Kepub Line-Height

[lordeagle]

Hi

I just noticed that I totally dislike the line-height of the books I read on my Kobo (Libra H20). Most books seem to fill a complete blank line between each and every line ... and therefore waste a lot of space ... so I'm way too often forced to paginate.

I have one book where I like the line-height ... there is almost none:


And lot's of others, where the wasted space is dis comfortable.




The way I load books: normally I use calibre and load books onto the reader with kobo utilities plugin, which does kepub.epub conversion. Just to be sure that this isn't the source of trouble I also tried some epubs converted 'kepubify' but with similar results.

What I don't understand in particual is, that the CSS style 'line-height' seems not to be interpreted. I can even set negative sizes (.e.g line-height: 0.5em; ) which will make the book unreadable on calibre viewer, due to overlapping lines. ....but the Kobo is totally resilient to these settings.

Is this a known issue? Anything special the kobo store books do that these converters are not aware of? I really see no obvious problem in the stylesheets, but maybe there is a trick?

The only thing I found that relaxes the situation a little is to set tiny font size (e.g. 0.8 em) to see more content on one page. But this can get really tedious to read

[Quoth]

There should be NO line-height figure / setting in the CSS. Then the default epub or kepub looks about right, AND the menu GUI to change the spacing will work.

Also you should be able to set the font on the page to any size comfortable.

Also some people only use epub on the Kobo. The kepub is more proprietary and though it has some nice features it renders less accurately.

[rashkae]

The Kobo forces a minimum line-height in the .body of the CSS. (I forget what exactly the number is, but it's somwhere around the 1.5 mark).. That's why trying to reduce line height is not helping you. The problem I think you are having with this particular book, however, is the font size is being reduced somewhere outside of the paragraph/div element,, (maybe in surrouding spans.).. the result of the shrunken font size, with the kobo minimum Line-height argument, is the really large spacing you see.

I would try to find and remove the font-size that is shrinking the text. (and then apply a font size to the body if needed to adjust the size of text, or re-run calibre epub to epub converstion without disabling font size recalling)

If you need assist, try using the epub scramble plugin to create a version of the book you can post here (or pm), and I'll fix it up, post the .css

[lordeagle]

Hey guys ... that must have been a typical nerd problem. I've inspected all the bits within the CSS of the kepub files. Compared them with others that I bought from the Kobo store. .... looked for failures in the translation plugins.

.... however, being relatively new to Kobo, I completely overlooked the normal 'font' menu on top of the Reader. I'm slightly embarrassed

But after all, you guys still kept the patience to help me
And I'll definitively stop hacking line-height and font-size attributes, know that I know that they have little effect onto the device.

Here are the improved results ... and a screenshot of the menu for other beginners like me

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by rashkae

The Kobo forces a minimum line-height in the .body of the CSS. (I forget what exactly the number is, but it's somwhere around the 1.5 mark).. That's why trying to reduce line height is not helping you. The problem I think you are having with this particular book, however, is the font size is being reduced somewhere outside of the paragraph/div element,, (maybe in surrouding spans.).. the result of the shrunken font size, with the kobo minimum Line-height argument, is the really large spacing you see.

I would try to find and remove the font-size that is shrinking the text. (and then apply a font size to the body if needed to adjust the size of text, or re-run calibre epub to epub converstion without disabling font size recalling)

If you need assist, try using the epub scramble plugin to create a version of the book you can post here (or pm), and I'll fix it up, post the .css

Kobo does not force a line-height of 1.5. If it did, that would be a line-height larger then that of a Kindle with KFX eBook.

A lot of eBooks set a line-height. I remove them and then set my own line-height using the slider. So chances are these eBooks with a line-height of too large is setting a line-height in CSS. Use the Calibre editor to remove the line-height from CSS.