Kobo Firmware 3.5.0

[arspr]

Originally Posted by davidfor

I think your interpretation of widows and orphans is is correct. What I suspect is happening is that Kobo is being a bit pessimistic when working out the the amount of space left on a page. Having the bottom part of a line missing from the screen would probably be considered worse than a little extra whitespace.

Your pictures make it hard to tell. The exact number of lines on a page is affected by the number paragraphs and how much space is between them. I suspect these have the top and bottom margin set to zero, but I can't be sure. Because of that, you can't simply count lines.

I do not agree with you davidfor.

Of course in the second image I cannot assure if there's enough space for TWO more lines. Maybe it seems enough, but in fact it isn't barely ...

But, it really doesn't matter because I'm just speaking of ONE line. I just want to move the third line of the paragraph from the third "page" to the bottom of second. And I can assure that there's more than enough free space for that single line.

Originally Posted by davidfor

With all the discussion on widows and orphans, I have never been able to come up with a good test case. The font size and the line length and text all affects this. That makes it a hard to get something that lines up to show the results desired.

Any book is actually suitable. Just play with margins and font size till you get an adequate layout like the one I've posted.

(Of course you can never be sure if you really have enough room for the last line, but when you see faults involving two or more lines at glance, you can be sure something is not working properly).

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I think this is that case, the widows/orphans rules are simply absurd and there is no good way to implement them.

GeoffR, please, don't make me laugh. Even MS Word does it correctly.

DUMMY PROCEDURE FOR STRICT RENDERING OF WIDOWS AND ORPHANS. (Other procedures with direct calculation of needed spaces are fully feasible and possibly desirable):

1. Start rendering your page with whatever font-size, margin, spaces between lines, (... whatever ...), settings.
2. When you reach the bottom of the page, if your paragraph is split then perform the ORPHAN test.
   • If it is not valid> Move the whole paragraph to the next page.
   • If it is valid > Render the rest of the paragraph in the next page.
     1. Perform the WIDOW test in that new second page.
        • If it is valid > You've finished. Continue rendering your new second page...
        • If it is not valid > Move as much lines as you need from the previous page. Of course you can end moving the whole paragraph if you need more lines than available in the previous page.
          • If there were lines left in the previous page, re-do the ORPHAN test in them. If it fails, move those remaining lines (ie. the whole paragraph) to the beginning of the new second page.

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

Does this seriously bother people that much? Am I really the only person who doesn't fret about uneven white space -- or even the infamous long-paragraph bug -- and simply enjoys my book?

Well, I suppose you also think a bad formatted ebook/book or even with typos or plain orthographic errors is also equally enjoyable.

But I do prefer a GOOD looking edition. And it's a pity when that good publishing work is wasted because of silly software errors...

Of course, I'm not going to commit suicide neither I'm going to kill my neighbour because of my rage, neither I'm booking a date with the psychologist to treat a depression but it is somehow disappointing, don't you think?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by arspr

Maybe you are right, but I don't feel that is the spirit of that CSS formatting setting. Those widows and orphans are here in order to help the rendering looking prettier, and I don't think those huge unnecessary blank spaces are a pretty thing...

So I suppose the correct behaviour is my strict one... Nevertheless I'm no HTML/CSS expert at all, so you could be fully right and I fully wrong, even being a complete absurd standard in that case.

The issue I have with the way that ereaders use widows and orphans is that they were intended for paged media such as printed pages and not for computer style displays.

I've also found that some ereaders use a default of 2 for widows and orphans while others use a default of 3. In a book, either does look better but on a display, using widows and orphans does not help with readability -- in my opinion. My quick and dirty solution is to set widows and orphans to 1 in the css stylesheet.

Regards,
David

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

Does this seriously bother people that much? Am I really the only person who doesn't fret about uneven white space -- or even the infamous long-paragraph bug -- and simply enjoys my book?

Personally, I'm more bothered by the ebooks that use wide left/right and top/bottom margins to emulate the appearance of a printed page. If I really want that on an ereader, I'll buy a white ereader.

Regards,
David

[the.Mtn.Man]

Originally Posted by arspr

Well, I suppose you also think a bad formatted ebook/book or even with typos or plain orthographic errors is also equally enjoyable.

You can suppose whatever you like, but it really depends on the kind and extent of the errors. I'm referring to only what's being discussed here: a variable amount of white space from one page to the next, something I never even noticed until people in this forum brought it to my attention, and then I promptly forgot all about it.

Perhaps my perspective is a little different since my collection is comprised almost exclusively of free, public domain literature, and the occasional typo or formatting anomaly is to be expected and doesn't bother me in the slightest. Maybe I'd feel differently if I actually paid for my books.

[Rev. Bob]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Personally, I'm more bothered by the ebooks that use wide left/right and top/bottom margins to emulate the appearance of a printed page. If I really want that on an ereader, I'll buy a white ereader.

Right there with you on that. That's one thing I like about my Kobo; I can adjust those margins!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Yes, even though 0 is an invalid value for the widows and orphans.

Thanks.

0 is a valid value. 0 means off.

[arspr]

Of course bad handling of widows and orphans is not a crucial issue. And of course even a good hanling implies bigger blank spaces in the bottom of affected pages. So in the end you have to choose your prefered setting knowing its drawbacks. Widows and orphans are ugly (IMO) but blank artificial spaces are also ugly (also IMO), and you cannot get rid of both...

But although I'm no coder I really do not understand the difficulty of making that simple feature work properly. Maybe it is my ignorance at work but it really makes me disappointed...

OTOH I don't also like the extra margins in ebooks. I always edit my epubs order to kill them. And my AuraHD is white BTW...

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I think this is that case, the widows/orphans rules are simply absurd and there is no good way to implement them. Whatever choice is made, the resulting extra white space looks worse than the original widow/orphan.

That's why I turn off widows and orphans because it doesn't look good on an eInk screen.

[the.Mtn.Man]

Is this "widows/orphans" a setting in the e-reader or in the epubs themselves?

[arspr]

It's normally inside the epub, as it is a CSS property.

If it is not specifically set it should default to 2.

But for example Kepub renderer (ACCESS) completelly ignores this feature (value of 1). Although ACCESS allows you to set an external CSS file (complementary to the included CSS settings inside the kepub.epub file), it won't work either.

There's no direct GUI access to this feature in the kobo software. But please remember that even margin or font size settings which have GUI access can also be affected by the ebook internal CSS settings. (Because of that I talked about editing ebooks to kill margins)

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

Does this seriously bother people that much? Am I really the only person who doesn't fret about uneven white space -- or even the infamous long-paragraph bug -- and simply enjoys my book?

The uneven layout that results from using the default values of widows:2;orphans:2; does greatly detract from my reading experience, as much as spelling mistakes or missing scene breaks.

Luckily it is trivial to fix the problem by changing the defaults in the book's stylesheet.

Edit: I thought about different ways the widows/orphans rules could be implemented, ways that don't result in blank lines being added to the bottom of the page: One is to increase the spacing between words to make the offending paragraph longer, eliminating the widow. Another is to increase the page's line spacing, and so evenly spreading out the blank lines over the whole page. I think the latter is the best way to do it if it had to be done, but still worse than just leaving the orphan/widow in place.

[arspr]

And yet another new bug... In this case in the Web browser.

The transparency of certain (all?) images is broken. They are displayed in black. Examples:
www.google.es (possibly .com or .whatever?) >> Look at the upper left corner
www.tweakguides.com >> Look at the logo

I've jumped to 3.5.0 from 3.3.0 because the ultra-refresh issue so I don't know if 3.4.0 is affected. 3.3 wasn't.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

The uneven layout that results from using the default values of widows:2;orphans:2; does greatly detract from my reading experience, as much as spelling mistakes or missing scene breaks.

Luckily it is trivial to fix the problem by changing the defaults in the book's stylesheet.

Edit: I thought about different ways the widows/orphans rules could be implemented, ways that don't result in blank lines being added to the bottom of the page: One is to increase the spacing between words to make the offending paragraph longer, eliminating the widow. Another is to increase the page's line spacing, and so evenly spreading out the blank lines over the whole page. I think the latter is the best way to do it if it had to be done, but still worse than just leaving the orphan/widow in place.

Changing the line height based on widows and orphans would be annoying to have the line height be different for different pages. I don't think that would work at all. What would work is if there is some hack/patch that can default the widows & orphans to be off.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Changing the line height based on widows and orphans would be annoying to have the line height be different for different pages. I don't think that would work at all. What would work is if there is some hack/patch that can default the widows & orphans to be off.

I do have a patch for that, but if you use Calibre there is no need for a patch as the Kobo driver has a modify css feature that allows the widows/orphans values to be set automatically when the book is sent to the device.

[the.Mtn.Man]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

The uneven layout that results from using the default values of widows:2;orphans:2; does greatly detract from my reading experience, as much as spelling mistakes or missing scene breaks.

Interesting.