360 Plus 360 .v. 360 Genium font interpretation

[jedd]

Howdi,

I've had my 360 for a year or so now, and recently bought my other half a 360+.

After seeing lots of recommendations on this forum for Genium fonts I gave them a go - just copying from my Debian GNU/Linux box straight into the device - and now use that font exclusively for epub and mobi.

I tried the same thing on the 360+, and it looks really ugly. Photo attached.

I've fiddled with 'best' .v. 'fastest' render, turned up all quality settings to the same, font size is identical (28pt), margin set to medium, line space to 90, and so on. Hypehation on and off on the 360+, and so on.

I bumped up my 360's fbreader to the latest version, and it works just as well as it did with the vanilla reader I've been using for a year.

I haven't yet bumped up the 360+'s reader version - just configured the extensions.cfg to use fbreader over whatever ugly 'we're too cool to have a settings button' viewer it uses by default.

Is this a known problem? Anything really obvious (short of going to fbreader 180 0.11.3, which I'll do soon) that I'm missing?

[kacir]

I have noticed this as well, when I was preparing PB360+ devices for several people around me.
I have copied my favourite fonts over, and I couldn't find configuration where the fonts would look good. Unfortunately the Christmas were drawing close and I had to hand over the gadgets ;-)
I had concluded that the new owners would have to find fonts that look good on the new readers.
I think it is caused by different software for rendering text, or perhaps just different setting in the antialiasing.

This is one of reasons I am in no hurry to switch from my PB360 to PB360+.
Another reason is that I found the browser in the newest PB360+ firmware completely useless. Perhaps developers were too preoccupied testing it on touch-enabled devices - I have heard that PB602 devices are not in production anymore.

[Sil_liS]

Have you tried making it bold?

[jedd]

Yup - I tried bold font, but it doesn't look easy on the eyes.

As I say, later on I'll try upgrading to a new version of fbreader for 360+ on the thing, but I'm not confident this will fix it, because of what I'm seeing with different settings already.

The built-in fbreader's pop-up (the 3x3 grid) for configuration seems to not respect the 360's 'system font' selection, so it's a bit hard to read.

Within fbreader on the 360+ itself I'm using PT Serif Regular 28pt - and it looks really really good. This is with the same configuration (fonts set to 'emboldened' or 'good quality' rather than 'Not antialiased' , and choosing render quality above speed) as when the Genium looks whacky.

kacir - it's reassuring (I'm not crazy) that you've seen the same thing .. but a bit disappointing that it may be an endemic problem.

It's a shame, because the 360+ feels way more responsive, of course, than my 360 - but AFAIK the only differences were more RAM and a faster CPU. Screen resolution and software, I expected to be identical. Oh well.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by jedd

It's a shame, because the 360+ feels way more responsive, of course, than my 360 - but AFAIK the only differences were more RAM and a faster CPU. Screen resolution and software, I expected to be identical. Oh well.

The 360+ software is based off the Pro line, not the 301/360 line.
Have you tried Coolreader3? It has its own distinct rendering engine and a *lot* of extra font rendering tweaks. You might get genium working fine with it.

[BCotton]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The 360+ software is based off the Pro line, not the 301/360 line.
Have you tried Coolreader3? It has its own distinct rendering engine and a *lot* of extra font rendering tweaks. You might get genium working fine with it.

Thank you for the suggestion. Slab serif fonts looked terrible on Fbreader but they look good on Coolreader. Another problem is that the fonts look washed out unless you set it to refresh with every pageturn.