Forma I'm very slightly bothered that the table of contents uses gray text (and not black).

[droopy]

I install books into my Forma with Calibre, which auto-converts ePubs/mobi/azw3 into Kobo Epub. I noticed that these books have a table of contents which is beautiful in every way, except one thing: the shade of the text is gray. Now, I'm not an old-timer (yet), but I'd rather have a greater contrast between the white background and text.

Anyone else bothered by this?
If so, what do you do (what can I do) to make the Table of Contents text darker/black?

I suppose it's gray because, in color, hyperlinked text is actually purple or blue. Wish Kobo Forma treated hyperlinks in some other way. That is to say, instead of turning the text to gray, use, for example, dotted underlines. Dotted underlines could be the new signifier of hyperlinks.

[lumpynose]

"I'm very slightly bothered" Which one is it? Make up your mind.

[droopy]

Ha ha ha. Very modifies slightly.

So very slightly bothered is the sort of bothered which is less bothered than slightly bothered

[lumpynose]

Which table of contents, the one you see when you tap on the table of contents button/icon or the html one that calibre generated? In the former case I'm slightly (but not very) bothered that the subchapters aren't indented more.

[droopy]

Hi Lumpy,
I was referring to the latter, the TOC that you see between the cover image and Chapter 1. Or not the TOC that appears when you tap on the bullet-list icon on the lower-right section of the Forma (to the left of the "Aa" icon).

But now that you mention the TOC that appears when tapping the TOC icon/button... that's too bad they don't indent the subchapters. Why did Kobo make a change for the worse?

P.S. LumpyNose, your device profile says you use a PalmPilot. Hmmmm... perhaps you should add your Kobo device.

[lumpynose]

Originally Posted by droopy

P.S. LumpyNose, your device profile says you use a PalmPilot. Hmmmm... perhaps you should add your Kobo device.

I'm too cheap to actually buy a Kobo, I just borrow ereaders from family and friends.

[MGlitch]

Both the grey vs black and the indentation can likely be resolved with patches. I know that the indentation has been addressed in a patch but I think it was to reduce it not increase it.

In either case there’s a thread you can request patches in

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...=312598&page=7

Patching is pretty easy and with all the tweaks available it’s possible you’ll like your Kobo even more after trying them

[droopy]

Thanks, MGlitch! I enjoyed tweaking my laptop and phone (as a non-coder/non-programmer). I think I'll enjoy tweaking my Kobo too.

UPDATE: I posted into that patchrequest thread. My post is https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...&postcount=255

[lumpynose]

Since it's the HTML one that's grey shouldn't you to be able to tweak that with some CSS? In calibre even? I think if you look at the epub on your computer, e.g. with Calibre's viewer you'll probably see that the table of contents is blue since they're links. A better color would be the pseudo color currentColor which will do the right thing if you switch to night mode or white on black.

[davidfor]

As @lumpynose implies, the "bug" is that the device is actually rendering the book as asked. Whoever created the book decided that the contents page should have different colours for the ToC links and these are being rendered as paler greys. If you open them on a device/apps that can show colours, you will see this. The calibre viewer is a good method to see this.

As far as I can tell, the default styles used for a link on the device are simply to underline them. If there are any colours used, they are not obvious.

The fix is to fix the book. There isn't really a way to patch this as each book will use different colours or styles for these links. And knowing which are the styles to change is not really possible. At the most, the patch could set a standard style for all links, and that is probably not desirable.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by davidfor

As far as I can tell, the default styles used for a link on the device are simply to underline them. If there are any colours used, they are not obvious.

I don't think this is true for kepubs as the firmware's default CSS override area for kepubs (kepub-book.css) contains this:

a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active { border-bottom: 1px dotted black !important; color: #696969 !important; }

I've just been playing about with it using a kobopatch and patching this line does appear to change the appearance of hyperlinks in my kepubs. I've tried both of these customisations to get different look&feel but I haven't played long enough to know whether there are unwelcome side-effects elsewhere:

a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active { border-bottom: 2px dashed black !important; color: inherit !important; }

a { border: none !important; background-color: #bbb !important; color: inherit !important;                    }

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I don't think this is true for kepubs as the firmware's default CSS override area for kepubs (kepub-book.css) contains this:

a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active { border-bottom: 1px dotted black !important; color: #696969 !important; }

I would have sworn they weren't styled. But, the only example I can find at the moment is one I know has styles on the links. I'll have to look later.