Touch Past-version bugs in 2.51. Others seeing this?

[MacEachaidh]

Hi all,
So, my Touch is still on 2.51 (loaded from the desktop update, not sideloaded), and is starting to show up a couple of bugs that I had experienced in previous versions of the firmware, but had thought were squelched.

Namely:

1) Sometimes, a single tap to move to the next page producs the next page incompletely written (only two non-contiguous strips of text, with the rest of the page blank) and then the next page after that is written to the screen. Very sure I haven't done a double-tap. I can then move back one page to the page that got skipped, and this time it writes to the screen correctly.

2) Sometimes, without my touching the screen, a word will be selected spontaneously (ie the control handles appear) and the prompts appear at the bottom of the screen as if I wanted to look this word up in the dictionary ... and the screen locks. When this happens, the X in the bottom-right corner is unresponsive, the screen is unresponsive, and the Home Screen button on the device produces no result. The slider at the top of the Touch works, though, and shutting the device off, then booting it up again and coming back to the book through the Home screen frees it up again. No idea what sets this off.

Just to be clear, I keep the screen clean, and the infra-red ports around the inside of the bezel clean and clear of fluff or dust. I hold the device with my hand across the back, so it's not a matter of fingertips overlapping the bezel and signalling unintentionally.

I don't really want to do a factory reset, if I can avoid it, because I don't want to go to 2.61.

Anyone else seeing similar behaviour on their Touch?

[PeterT]

Oh yes... have seen all those issues for a long LONG time. See Curious: Do others get this bug

Since getting a Glo I still see the missed page turn issue, but have not had the other "hang up with word selected" bug.

[MacEachaidh]

Thanks for the reply, Pete.

Yes, I saw that other thread, but since my bugs were different from what you were describing, I wasn't sure if tacking something different onto the end might be deemed hijacking the thread, so I opted for opening a new one.

Thanks for confirming I'm not alone in this () — my mistake, though, I thought that the bugs I was describing had actually been fixed a while back. I guess not.

OK, stating the obvious, but I'd rather things like this get fixed than have a new round of reader rewards and the like.

(Sorry to grump, don't mind me, but I personally have no interest in the "social media" aspects and suchlike sparkly bits. I bought the thing to read books, and I kinda figure bugs in the display and navigation of a book should probably be top priority in new firmware releases. And now I think at this point I'm supposed to say "Bah, humbug!")

[PeterT]

I hear you with the old bugs not being fixed.

At least I know one old bug I had griped about for a long time has been resolved; it was one where in some conditions a hyphenated word was not fully displayed with certain selections of fonts and size.

[MacEachaidh]

Oh, I hadn't come across that one. (Yet.)

This is a little off-topic for my own thread ( !), but since you mention fonts, may I ask — are there any known problems with screen display for fonts that didn't come with the Touch?

I have a couple of favourite fonts for reading, that i tend to use for all my own documents because of their clean lines and legibility. I tried loading them onto my Kobo — I read up about the naming conventions that the Kobo expects, and in that they worked fine. (By which I mean, they behaved correctly as far as bolding and italics went.) But when I tried to use them as the basic font for a book, they looked bloody awful.

At first I thought it might be a screen resolution thing, and I'm aware that anti-aliasing is limited; I tried a couple of different versions of the fonts, varying the encoded true type hinting in the font itself, and playing with the advanced settings on each of the font variants to see if I could find a display-friendly setting.

There was no such thing. They all looked like exceedingly clumsy bitmapped fonts at the wrong resolution. Just a mess.

I'm sure it's impossible for someone to tell me what I might have done wrong without seeing the fonts for themselves. But are there guidelines somewhere on basic steps to follow — not in loading the fonts or getting the Kobo to recognise them, because I achieved that just fine; but in standard ways to optimise the fonts for an eInk display, and to understand what may or may not be helpful in anti-aliasing and hinting within the font itself?

[PeterT]

Unfortunately, not that I know of. Some members here do seem to have a lot of knowledge (and opinions) on fonts for eReaders; try reaching out to JSWolf and see if he has some insights he could share.

What fonts DID you try?

[MacEachaidh]

Thanks Peter.

The one I put most effort into was a Truetype font called Caxton Book, a proportional serif font from Bitstream. It's fully embeddable (though I wasn't embedding it in the epub, just loading it onto the device and selecting it from the font menu) and has all the accented glyphs standard in Western European languages. Most of its letters looked very little like they do on a computer screen, and generally looked quite blobby (a highly technical typographical term, you must realise!).

I don't remember precisely which other ones I tried, but there were three or four. I disliked all of them, so ended up removing them.

Ah well, never mind. I'll see if I can engage JSWolf on the subject, and see what observations he/she might have to make. In the meantime, for the epubs I reformat for my own use (an ever-increasing number, even of many commercial releases I buy!) I tend to embed appropriate fonts for the headings and just use Amasis for the body text. That keeps me going, at least.

Thanks for your help and comments, Peter.

[Anak]

Originally Posted by MacEachaidh

Oh, I hadn't come across that one. (Yet.)

This is a little off-topic for my own thread ( !), but since you mention fonts, may I ask — are there any known problems with screen display for fonts that didn't come with the Touch?

I have a couple of favourite fonts for reading, that i tend to use for all my own documents because of their clean lines and legibility. I tried loading them onto my Kobo — I read up about the naming conventions that the Kobo expects, and in that they worked fine. (By which I mean, they behaved correctly as far as bolding and italics went.) But when I tried to use them as the basic font for a book, they looked bloody awful.

At first I thought it might be a screen resolution thing, and I'm aware that anti-aliasing is limited; I tried a couple of different versions of the fonts, varying the encoded true type hinting in the font itself, and playing with the advanced settings on each of the font variants to see if I could find a display-friendly setting.

There was no such thing. They all looked like exceedingly clumsy bitmapped fonts at the wrong resolution. Just a mess.

I'm sure it's impossible for someone to tell me what I might have done wrong without seeing the fonts for themselves. But are there guidelines somewhere on basic steps to follow — not in loading the fonts or getting the Kobo to recognise them, because I achieved that just fine; but in standard ways to optimise the fonts for an eInk display, and to understand what may or may not be helpful in anti-aliasing and hinting within the font itself?

I've had this with some sideloaded fonts in TTF format. The styles in font family worked correctly but the font rendering itself looked terrible: a very pixelated instead of smooth output.
What it caused? I don't know.

The only advise I can give is: if possible, take a OTF instead of a TTF font.
I've never encountered this pixelated output with OTF fonts. TTF fonts can give mixed result. On a individual font family basis, only trial and error will tell.

If you don't have or can't find a OTF version of a TTF font then a font editing program can help to convert your pixelated TTF font into a smooth OTF font. You don't have to do change any setting to smoothen the font but you do have to check manually if all internal font family references (naming and ID) are correct. If not, you're font looks smooth but renders a bold variant instead of italics (sounds familiar, isn't it).

@MacEachaidh, PM me, I'll try to fix your TTF font as described above.