Kobo Firmware 2.8.1: pass or fail? (poll)

[treadlightly]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

If it was me I would be prioritising the actual reading bugs, such as double page turns, and the pages turning in the opposite direction. I cannot imagine why these are so difficult to address. And the book re-opening on the wrong page.

Hmm.. I don't see any of these bugs on my glo. For me the reading bugs they need to fix are the page display ones related to the epub renderer.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by treadlightly

Hmm.. I don't see any of these bugs on my glo. For me the reading bugs they need to fix are the page display ones related to the epub renderer.

Some are lucky this way. Good for you and I mean this sincerely. Many of the bugs just show up if you have a lot of books on your reader. And some just show up for some of us.

I am curious though. If you change the page justification for epubs, does it change in your books? It did for me the first time I did it on the mini and never again. In fact it went back to unjustified all on it's own (the book not the menu selection) Didn't change it at all on the Aura. I was changing it to justified
to see if that might stop the book opening on the wrong page. But then again I have never had a problem changing many of the things that others encounter. Unreasonably I think these things should work the same for everybody at least for the majority of books.

Helen

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

If it was me I would be prioritising the actual reading bugs, such as double page turns, and the pages turning in the opposite direction. I cannot imagine why these are so difficult to address. And the book re-opening on the wrong page.

I haven't noticed any of these on either of my 2 Kobos. Mind you I'm a 'tapper' not a 'swiper'. I wonder if that makes a difference?

Similarly, I totally ignored fw2.4.x to try and avoid the reopening on wrong page. Is it still present in 2.8.1?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I am curious though. If you change the page justification for epubs, does it change in your books? It did for me the first time I did it on the mini and never again. In fact it went back to unjustified all on it's own (the book not the menu selection) Didn't change it at all on the Aura. I was changing it to justified
to see if that might stop the book opening on the wrong page. But then again I have never had a problem changing many of the things that others encounter. Unreasonably I think these things should work the same for everybody at least for the majority of books.

I would think that text justification adjustment problems are almost certainly due to individual epub internal css, at least for standard epubs. I don't know about kepubs.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I haven't noticed any of these on either of my 2 Kobos. Mind you I'm a 'tapper' not a 'swiper'. I wonder if that makes a difference?

Similarly, I totally ignored fw2.4.x to try and avoid the reopening on wrong page. Is it still present in 2.8.1?

I am a tapper too. And yes it is still present for me on both my mini and my Aura although the mini it rarely happens since 2.8.1 and I haven't bothered to update the Aura.

I'm definitely a bit of a sniveler on these things. But for the most part I just deal with it. Might take me a few minutes to find my place again or realize I am reading the same pages over and over, but I still have hopefully a few years of life left and it won't totally ruin them

So tell me do your Kobos change the justification? Mine just refuse to after the one initial time.

Helen

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

So tell me do your Kobos change the justification? Mine just refuse to after the one initial time.

I'll PM you shortly.

[ectoplasm]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

..And the book re-opening on the wrong page.

Next I would make sure all the font and justification, margins 'features' work for the majority of books anyway.

My Aura has not been delivered yet, but I've seen the open-at-wrong-page problem with Coolreader for android. I've gotten used to making a "bookmark" by highlighting a few words so I can definitely find my spot when returning. I don't know if the Kobo has a similar feature.

Regarding justification, I don't get why ereaders struggle with this either. I prefer non-justified, so I tend to open an epub in Sigil and replace text-align:justify with text-align:left if necessary. I'm not sure why ereaders can't do a similar strategy, but I remember Kindles also had a problem toggling justification. Also I don't think justification should change page layout and page breaks. It should only introduce extra spacing between words on a line.

[jackastor]

So far the majority of you, 77% have voted overwhelmingly for a pass.


The poll is still open feel free to weigh in those of you who have yet to.

regards

Jack

[franklekens]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Do you use Calibre to transfer epubs to your Kobos? If so, there is a fairly easy way to add your preferred top margin to all your epubs. It would need you to resend all your epubs to the Kobo but you wouldn't need to manually edit each epub to add the top margin.

Sorry for the late response, thanks for the heads up.
Is it something like this solution?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=158

That looks great, I'll try it out. (The widow/orphan thing is another pet peeve of mine.)
Only what should I add to get a top margin of about one line of text in all books?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by franklekens

Sorry for the late response, thanks for the heads up.
Is it something like this solution?
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...&postcount=158

That looks great, I'll try it out. (The widow/orphan thing is another pet peeve of mine.)
Only what should I add to get a top margin of about one line of text in all books?

Yes, that's the correct link. I too like to add a bit of whitespace at the top of each page (I only read standard epubs), so I've added this to my kobo_extra.css:

On the Glo:

@page {margin-top: 5pt; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0}

On the AuraHD:

@page {margin-top: 10pt; margin-bottom: 0; margin-left: 0; margin-right: 0}

You may need to experiment with the margin-top value until it's just right for you.

BTW, adding an @page command to kobo_extra.css has the extra benefit that if the internal css of any of your epubs already contains an @page with totally unsuitable margins then it is automatically removed before adding the custom @page you do like, during the calibre send-to-device. So even those people who like to have no top margin at all, in standard epubs, should benefit by adding an @page with margin-top set to zero.

[franklekens]

Thank you, that's very useful.

In the conversion dialogue of Calibre, there's also an option to "remove spacing between paragraphs". Do you happen to know if there's an easy css line that can be added to achieve the same? I really dislike extra spacing between paragraphs (other than intended blank lines between sections of text). Right now converting a book is the only way for me to remedy that.

I like the elegance of this kobo_extra.css solution, since it preserves the original on your hard disk and only changes the book when sending it to the device!

[franklekens]

By the way: the widow/orphan setting doesn't quite remedy what I want remedied. Just tried it with the Feedbooks version of Middlemarch.
Chapter 3 still starts like this: a big white space after the first paragraph, because the second paragraph is too long to fit on one page.



Maybe that's not the widow/orphan thing.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by franklekens

In the conversion dialogue of Calibre, there's also an option to "remove spacing between paragraphs". Do you happen to know if there's an easy css line that can be added to achieve the same? I really dislike extra spacing between paragraphs (other than intended blank lines between sections of text). Right now converting a book is the only way for me to remedy that.

Nothing that is likely to work for all epubs. Paragraph margins are too 'low' down the book structure levels for generic css to work well. If the space between paragraphs has been created by adding 'empty paragraphs' (e.g. <p>&nbsp;</p>) then no amount of css-tweaking can get rid of them.

You could try adding

body, div, p {margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0}

It may be effective on a few epubs but unlikely on any epub which has been through a calibre conversion. On the other hand, it probably won't do much harm either

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by franklekens

By the way: the widow/orphan setting doesn't quite remedy what I want remedied. Just tried it with the Feedbooks version of Middlemarch.
Chapter 3 still starts like this: a big white space after the first paragraph, because the second paragraph is too long to fit on one page.

Maybe that's not the widow/orphan thing.

I think that's probably the long-standing 'long paragraph' problem. Is the first paragraph on the next page a very long one?

There is now a hack that makes that problem go away and adds lots of other nice options. Look at the Kobo Patcher thread to decide whether you would be comfortable with it.