Kobo Firmware 2.6.1 - Page 17

franklekens · 06-09-2013, 02:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

This actually isn't an issue. It's the way it is in ADE. All versions of ADE default to a widow/orphan of 2. The only way to override that is to edit the CSS and put in the values you want.

I always put in values of 0. I don't care that it may not be grammatically correct. I just care that I use the most screen space I can and that most page ends end on the same line.

I'm not sure I understand. I don't want to have to edit CSS for every book I read, I don't even know how to do that. I just want the reader to display a book the way it should be. That means that when there's paragraphs spanning several pages, the reader shouldn't suddenly decide to make one paragraph fill only half a screen.

If there's some CSS setting that causes this (and I wonder which fool ever created *that*), at least the GUI of the reader should have some option to ignore it. (Called, for user friendliness' sake, something like "don't split long paragraphs" or "don't bother about orphans widows".)

When I say the option was created by a fool, by the way, I mean I genuinely don't understand it. Orphans/widows are supposed to be a typographer's nightmare: an orphaned single line at the top of a page, oh no, we should prevent that!
Alright, I get that. Although I don't find it very troublesome myself.
But in this case the remedy is to have pages where the text suddenly stops half page, whereas the author has never intended for there to be even a blank line: as though *that* isn't a typographer's nightmare!

I really don't get it. I don't get why the bug is there, I don't get why nothing is being done about it, and I don't exactly get how I can remedy it myself. (Plus I don't really want to manually edit all my books.)
Guess I'm just clueless.

Skydog · 06-09-2013, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by franklekens

I'm not sure I understand. I don't want to have to edit CSS for every book I read, I don't even know how to do that. I just want the reader to display a book the way it should be. That means that when there's paragraphs spanning several pages, the reader shouldn't suddenly decide to make one paragraph fill only half a screen.

If there's some CSS setting that causes this (and I wonder which fool ever created *that*), at least the GUI of the reader should have some option to ignore it. (Called, for user friendliness' sake, something like "don't split long paragraphs" or "don't bother about orphans widows".)

When I say the option was created by a fool, by the way, I mean I genuinely don't understand it. Orphans/widows are supposed to be a typographer's nightmare: an orphaned single line at the top of a page, oh no, we should prevent that!
Alright, I get that. Although I don't find it very troublesome myself.
But in this case the remedy is to have pages where the text suddenly stops half page, whereas the author has never intended for there to be even a blank line: as though *that* isn't a typographer's nightmare!

I really don't get it. I don't get why the bug is there, I don't get why nothing is being done about it, and I don't exactly get how I can remedy it myself. (Plus I don't really want to manually edit all my books.)
Guess I'm just clueless.

I say this half tongue-in-cheek but perhaps you should try a Kindle which renders a book correctly without the orphans/widows problem and uses the entire display for text. However, there is not the same level of customization and no native epub support but conversions are painless and don't require work.

I do agree with you that the end-user should not have jump through hoops to have an ebook display correctly.

EDIT: Well, never mind. I see you have a Kindle Touch in your profile. I should know better than to post via Tapatalk from a phone.

kaufman · 06-09-2013, 03:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by franklekens

This is incredible. This is the bug that makes the reader behave weird with paragraphs that go on for more than a page, right? Resulting in sudden screens only being half-filled with text.

Perhaps they aren't as worried about it because its a bug that most people aren't ever going to see.

Although, I agree with you about not caring about the sleep screen.

aceflor · 06-09-2013, 03:41 PM

The same here. I could not care less about how the reader looks like when I am not using it, but I do care, a lot, about how my pages look when I am reading a book.

treadlightly · 06-09-2013, 05:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by franklekens

I really don't get it. I don't get why the bug is there, I don't get why nothing is being done about it, and I don't exactly get how I can remedy it myself. (Plus I don't really want to manually edit all my books.)
Guess I'm just clueless.

Nope, you're not clueless. I also would like to see orphans/widows set to a value by the ereader that can be specified by the user on the ereader (I imagine many of us would choose 0). I know how to change values in the .css but I don't think the user should have to - all the values for margins, spacing, justification, fonts, widows, etc. should be customizable on the ereader and override the ebook settings.

davidfor · 06-09-2013, 07:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jackie_w

If you're feeling brave

you can try the suggestion in this post. There's a bit more detail in the posts immediately following. It worked for me in fw2.5.2.

Or you can try this plugin from calibre.

Skydog · 06-09-2013, 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidfor

Or you can try this plugin from calibre.

I forgot that was one of the features included. I have not yet tried the plugin but definitely will. Again, we have to rely on some talented people here to accomplish tasks Kobo could make available.

davidfor · 06-09-2013, 08:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by franklekens

I'm not sure I understand. I don't want to have to edit CSS for every book I read, I don't even know how to do that. I just want the reader to display a book the way it should be. That means that when there's paragraphs spanning several pages, the reader shouldn't suddenly decide to make one paragraph fill only half a screen.

If there's some CSS setting that causes this (and I wonder which fool ever created *that*), at least the GUI of the reader should have some option to ignore it. (Called, for user friendliness' sake, something like "don't split long paragraphs" or "don't bother about orphans widows".)

When I say the option was created by a fool, by the way, I mean I genuinely don't understand it. Orphans/widows are supposed to be a typographer's nightmare: an orphaned single line at the top of a page, oh no, we should prevent that!
Alright, I get that. Although I don't find it very troublesome myself.
But in this case the remedy is to have pages where the text suddenly stops half page, whereas the author has never intended for there to be even a blank line: as though *that* isn't a typographer's nightmare!

I really don't get it. I don't get why the bug is there, I don't get why nothing is being done about it, and I don't exactly get how I can remedy it myself. (Plus I don't really want to manually edit all my books.)
Guess I'm just clueless.

You are confusing two things. The widows and orphans handling is completely unrelated to the long paragraph bug. The fact that long paragraphs (more than a screen of text at your current settings) get pushed to a new page rather than split in the right place has nothing to do with widows and orphans. For some reason everyone puts them into the same bucket and that just confuses things.

Why isn't this fixed? Because Kobo have decided there are more important things to do. It probably means it is harder to fix than you think and they fell the effort is better spent elsewhere. And I can see why. It was at least 10 months after I got my touch that I heard of the bug. Someone had to produce a test case to demonstrate it. Personally, I have only seen it in three books that I have read. So, were are talking less than 1% of the books that have read since getting an ereader. It is more common in the classics, so people who read those are more likely to see the problem. Yes, it should be fixed, but there have been more serious bugs that affected the reading experience that needed to be fixed first.

As to widows and orphans, Kobo have decided to respect the epub standards. And not just for this but for a lot of other style options. This mean that the books should be layed out how the author or designer decided it should be. If they decided there should be space between paragraphs and no idents, there will be. But if they decided to emulate most paper books and have no gaps with an indent, the book will be displayed that way. Unfortunately, most books don't have the widows and orphans set in the CSS so it falls back to the defaults. And that might not have been a great choice.

The style choices, or lack of choices, could be overridden by the ereader. But, that isn't as easy as it sounds. Potentially, each paragraph could have a different style and the formatting that gives to the book could be important. So which do you override? You could override the style on the body tag, but, the rest of the styles probably inherit from it and that could lead to a mess when reading.

DNSB · 06-09-2013, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by theonna

DNSB
Here are my notes with new firmware, the syncing time improved dramatically.
I don't ignore your solution, more than 70% of my books are not in English, so I can not search for them. Kobo is fine displaying them so is Nook, Sony and Kindle- they all have unicode support. Neither can search them. File manager will not solve all my problems, but it will make my library by far more convenient for me.
I put my specks under the spoiler. I do not load my books into Calibre each time. I use the same collection. I also did not run epub validity checks on them, but I've loaded those same books on Nook, Sony and Pocketbook readers with no problems or need for extensive syncing, or even need for Calibre. I did relog this time on my Kobo to start with fresh database and deleted all the books from it as well. So all the times are for putting fresh collection of books on the new Aura.

Spoiler:

Going by what you posted above, the time for the Aura to process your uploaded books was around 21 minutes. A fair bit longer than the time I see but not that far off considering I transfer 1800 books and you transferred 2449 -- just checked and your log says 2449 books to transfer but only 1844 were transferred so your times are considerably longer than what I see. Are the ebooks stored as epubs on the Aura or are they being converted on the fly? And what happened to the other 605 books that weren't transferred.

OTOH, your times to transfer from your Mac to the Aura are actually shorter than what I see from my PC. I'm going to have to try a transfer on my iMac just to see if it takes a similar time.

So from 40 minutes for Calibre to process, 30 minutes to upload and 50 minutes for the Aura to process content for a total of 2 hours as you stated in the message where you said I had a very special Aura, you now show 81 minutes to process the books, 6 minutes and 33 seconds to transfer the books and about 21 minutes for the Aura to process the books. I have to ask why those numbers are so different. The total for the last two does land in the same neighbourhood as the total time as I see for a transfer and process.

One of the few items I can think of is if you are you converting the books using the Extended driver to .kepub.epub? If so, whinge at the author of the extended driver and not at Kobo over that 81 minutes to process the ebooks.

As a sop to my own curiosity, what languages are you reading in? If unicode support is all you need to read on a Nook or Sony, I'm going to have to eliminate most of the logographic and right to left languages as well as all those that use a Latin alphabet. If using Japanese, furigana and tategaki are going to need a minimal level of epub3 support. Ditto for vertical support in Chinese and Korean.

Regards,
David

justywusty · 06-09-2013, 08:41 PM

The long paragraph bug for the kobo nickel font I've seemed to be able to make go away when I increase the line spacing option to what looks like 40% or greater...as soon as I do anything under that, it pushes the paragraph to the next page. Tested on both kepubs from the kobo store and kepubs generated using the kobo touch extended calibre plugin.

DNSB · 06-09-2013, 08:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by treadlightly

Nope, you're not clueless. I also would like to see orphans/widows set to a value by the ereader that can be specified by the user on the ereader (I imagine many of us would choose 0). I know how to change values in the .css but I don't think the user should have to - all the values for margins, spacing, justification, fonts, widows, etc. should be customizable on the ereader and override the ebook settings.

That one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that the ebook reader should respect the way the ebook publisher styled the ebook. Did they want wide margins? Indented paragraphs? Large spaces between lines and paragraphs? Kobo seems to fall into the respect the publisher styling. Do you complain that physical books are not styled the way you would prefer? Ghu knows quite a few of them deserve complaints but do you even think about complaining?

My personal attitude that I want the ebooks to look the way I want is what has led me into modifying the stylesheets in almost every non-DRMed ebook I own. I don't expect anyone else to agree with all my choices and some of the few who have looked at my ebook styling have described it as boring.

Regards,
David

DNSB · 06-09-2013, 08:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kaufman

Perhaps they aren't as worried about it because its a bug that most people aren't ever going to see.

Although, I agree with you about not caring about the sleep screen.

I'd suspect the answer is more that it is a bug in the Adobe Reader Mobile code and Kobo is not spending any developer time on epub2 support that could be better spent on epub3 support. For Kobo in the international market, epub3 is where they have to be going. If ACCESS or Kobo manage to add Adobe ADEPT DRM support into the epub3 renderer, my opinion is that the Adobe ARM renderer is going to be dropped and every ebook will use the same renderer.

Regards,
David

DNSB · 06-09-2013, 09:04 PM

[QUOTE=Anak;2538136]It's correct. fw 2.6.1 has the same header size as 2.5.2 but without the book title info text.[QUOTE]

For an epub book on an Aura, the 2.61 firmware has less than a 5mm header from the edge of the bezel to the top of the ascender on a character on the first line. 2.5.2 used quite a bit more space than that. I didn't write down the exact measurement but in the neighbourhood of 10mm going by my memory. 2.5.1 had about a 3mm header.

The easy way to tell that 2.6.1 has a much narrow top margin than 2.5.2 is to tap the middle of the screen -- on 2.5.2 no text was covered, on the font size I use most of the time, I lose most of the 2 lines of text at the top of the screen when they disappear behind the popup. I said most since the descenders on the second line stick down into view.

Regards,
David

treadlightly · 06-09-2013, 09:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DNSB

My personal attitude that I want the ebooks to look the way I want is what has led me into modifying the stylesheets in almost every non-DRMed ebook I own. I don't expect anyone else to agree with all my choices and some of the few who have looked at my ebook styling have described it as boring.

I agree, I want ebooks to look the way I want too. In my mind there is no reason why the device couldn't modify the stylesheet settings. If you want to modify yours on your computer, then great, you would select "Use ebook style" on your device. But for those who don't want to do any pre-processing, the settings should be able to be configured by the device. Some of them can be modified presently, why not more of them? One of the biggest reasons that I use an ereader is because I want to modify the display to my liking. So why should the ereader restrict this in any way? One of the reasons I chose Kobo was because it gives the greatest flexibility in this, and the more flexibility that is added will make it even better.

JD Gumby · 06-09-2013, 10:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DNSB

That one way of looking at it. The other way of looking at it is that the ebook reader should respect the way the ebook publisher styled the ebook. Did they want wide margins? Indented paragraphs? Large spaces between lines and paragraphs? Kobo seems to fall into the respect the publisher styling. Do you complain that physical books are not styled the way you would prefer? Ghu knows quite a few of them deserve complaints but do you even think about complaining?

Most paper prose books (barring poetry/lyric sections and suchline) go edge-to-edge, indent paragraphs with no space between paragraphs, have line spacing that is half (or less) of the character height (and which can vary slightly from page to page to keep widows & orphans to a minimum), and know how to split paragraphs when there is a page transition.

Is it really so much to ask that machines that can change formatting and font size on the fly get these sorts of thing right? I think not.

06-09-2013, 09:04 PM	#253
DNSB Bibliophagist Posts: 46,590 Karma: 169712392 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Vancouver Device: Kobo Sage, Libra Colour, Lenovo M8 FHD, Paperwhite 4, Tolino epos	[QUOTE=Anak;2538136]It's correct. fw 2.6.1 has the same header size as 2.5.2 but without the book title info text.[QUOTE] For an epub book on an Aura, the 2.61 firmware has less than a 5mm header from the edge of the bezel to the top of the ascender on a character on the first line. 2.5.2 used quite a bit more space than that. I didn't write down the exact measurement but in the neighbourhood of 10mm going by my memory. 2.5.1 had about a 3mm header. The easy way to tell that 2.6.1 has a much narrow top margin than 2.5.2 is to tap the middle of the screen -- on 2.5.2 no text was covered, on the font size I use most of the time, I lose most of the 2 lines of text at the top of the screen when they disappear behind the popup. I said most since the descenders on the second line stick down into view. Regards, David Last edited by DNSB; 06-09-2013 at 09:07 PM.

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06-09-2013, 03:41 PM	#244
aceflor Wizard Posts: 3,472 Karma: 48036360 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: where the sun lives, or so they say Device: Pocketbook Era, Pocketbook Inkpad 4, Kobo Libra 2, Kindle Scribe	The same here. I could not care less about how the reader looks like when I am not using it, but I do care, a lot, about how my pages look when I am reading a book.

06-09-2013, 08:41 PM	#250
justywusty Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 68778 Join Date: Oct 2011 Device: kobo touch	The long paragraph bug for the kobo nickel font I've seemed to be able to make go away when I increase the line spacing option to what looks like 40% or greater...as soon as I do anything under that, it pushes the paragraph to the next page. Tested on both kepubs from the kobo store and kepubs generated using the kobo touch extended calibre plugin.