Forma I will use whatever the default font face is set for a book. Here's why.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mirage

Do you really read 1000 word per minute? Not being sarcastic, just wondering.

Even if not, reading still takes a lot less time then listening to an audiobook.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You seem to have no problem using ePub on the nook. So why not use ePub on the Kobo instead of using the inferior (for typesetting) KePub?

Because I appreciate other features of kepub. I would just like to see Kobo invest the time to improve the formatting issues it has.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by mirage

Do you really read 1000 word per minute? Not being sarcastic, just wondering.

Yes. That's one reason as to why I suffer from the lack of a TBR.

I have fond memories of a reading speed test in high school where they ran me through several tests before they decided that I was not somehow cheating. How you can cheat on a test where you read a couple of pages and then answer questions about what was on those pages without having prior access to study the test pages escapes me.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

How would you go about properly spacing words without adding the code to handle microjustification (and microspacing)? That discussion has been ongoing in these forums for over a decade.

They could fudge more space at the beginning of sentences? That italics example just looks weird at the start of each sentence.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by DNSB

When you can find me an audiobook player that is capable of running at 1000WPM, I might be interested. Otherwise, you are asking me to waste time.

Makes me wonder how fast the players are for the blind. I remember reading somewhere that they can listen to screen readers and audiobooks at a very high speed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Because I appreciate other features of kepub. I would just like to see Kobo invest the time to improve the formatting issues it has.

What I'd like to see with Kobo is to have Access fixed so it works properly and I would like to have Kobo use the latest version RMSDK.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Makes me wonder how fast the players are for the blind. I remember reading somewhere that they can listen to screen readers and audiobooks at a very high speed.

At one point, I was involved with a group that developed a playback device that sped up and frequency shifted audio to allow playing back voice recordings at higher speeds. It could get up to 300-325WPM without sounding too bad but at 400WPM, you were definitely getting into chipmunk territory. Normal speech playback is about 150-160WPM. The experimental model was used at the Crane Library but, AFAIK, it never commercially produced.

The Audible player goes up to 3x but I've never listened to it at anything over 1.25x.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by DNSB

At one point, I was involved with a group that developed a playback device that sped up and frequency shifted audio to allow playing back voice recordings at higher speeds. It could get up to 300-325WPM without sounding too bad but at 400WPM, you were definitely getting into chipmunk territory.

I forgot about the frequency shifting. Way back in the good ol' days there were cassette recorders for dictation/note taking that could speed it up, and I think without needing to fix the frequency.

Then way back when I worked in a computer music research place one guy wrote something he called the phase vocoder. It could change the duration of a recording and keep the pitch/frequencies the same, or vice versa, change the pitch and keep the duration the same. It was computationally expensive but that was when cpu speeds were measured in kilohertz and ram was in single digit megabytes.

[mirage]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I read something yesterday saying that you may be able to improve your eyesight by staring into a red light.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/30/h...ess/index.html

Interesting read.

Originally Posted by DNSB

Yes. That's one reason as to why I suffer from the lack of a TBR.

I have fond memories of a reading speed test in high school where they ran me through several tests before they decided that I was not somehow cheating. How you can cheat on a test where you read a couple of pages and then answer questions about what was on those pages without having prior access to study the test pages escapes me.

That's remarkable. Did you train yourself to read at these speeds? Or did it come naturally? That's a valuable skill to have. I'm a relatively quick reader when I want to be and I'm focused, but nothing like those speeds. I like to read that fast when reading informational stuff that I don't get great pleasure from reading, but am motivated to know the content. More literary writing, even if it's non-fiction, I've actually slowed down some over the years on purpose.

I recall years ago that there were books and people on TV touting speed reading techniques. I read some stuff about it. Scanning large chunks of text without speaking the words in one's head was one of the techniques. The claim was that retention was better, too. I played around with it some, but didn't stick with it.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by mirage

That's remarkable. Did you train yourself to read at these speeds? Or did it come naturally? That's a valuable skill to have. I'm a relatively quick reader when I want to be and I'm focused, but nothing like those speeds. I like to read that fast when reading informational stuff that I don't get great pleasure from reading, but am motivated to know the content. More literary writing, even if it's non-fiction, I've actually slowed down some over the years on purpose.

I think it mostly came naturally. I started reading at a very early age⁠—my mother used to reminisce about me reading the backs of cereal boxes when I was 3. My parents taught in the Northwest Territories and I spent quite a bit of time sitting at the back of the classroom (the small schools had a single classroom, the bigger schools had 2!) so I'm tempted to say I learned to read by osmosis.

Originally Posted by mirage

I recall years ago that there were books and people on TV touting speed reading techniques. I read some stuff about it. Scanning large chunks of text without speaking the words in one's head was one of the techniques. The claim was that retention was better, too. I played around with it some, but didn't stick with it.

One article dumping on the speed reading programs attracted my ire and the author and I engaged in a rather nasty exchange of message. Basically, the author claimed that no one could read over ~280WPM unless they were only skimming which seriously compromises comprehension. He continually restated that physics said that one can take in more than 7-9 letters in a "fixation" and we are limited to 4-5 fixations per second so no one can read faster than his proclaimed maximum. We sidetracked into saccades and the discussion ended in a mutual decision that the other heretic was wrong and no longer worth wasting electrons on.

Sadly, a collection of deviant data points did not disprove his theory. He was not a fan of Thomas Huxley (the man responsible for "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.").

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by twowheels

I also use Publisher's Default, unless it's annoying, but that's quite rare for me. To be honest, I feel like a lot of you are way too picky! haha

I generally don't like most fonts to read. That's why I uploaded 4 fonts (normal, bold, bold italic and italic) of the same family to my kobo and that's what I'll always pick (or I'll even change the font in the book, via Calibre). And it's not being picky, it's being able to read comfortably or read with a bit more problem. I like the font I choose because it has long ascender and descender heights. Which means the lines are more apart from each other without having to increase the line height (that just creates whitespace between lines).

[ps67]

Originally Posted by twowheels

I also use Publisher's Default, unless it's annoying, but that's quite rare for me. To be honest, I feel like a lot of you are way too picky! haha

You are right, I complain myself because I can't simply read the book but I need to format it in the way I desire. On the other hand I learned new things in my fifty age and it is not a wasting time.

When the book is not too far from perfection (it depends from publisher and when I buy a book from a known publisher I can predict the work it needs) I simply read it, as it is downloaded directly from Kobo. In that case I use a font like Roboto Slab or Lexia Dama or Bitter so it is not so evident the lack of ligatures in Kepub. For Epub I use Bookerly or, sometime, I experiment Literata or Georgia Pro.

I almost never use the publisher font because generally it is too thin for a Kobo, or sometime I simply don't like it.

[mirage]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I think it mostly came naturally. I started reading at a very early age⁠—my mother used to reminisce about me reading the backs of cereal boxes when I was 3. My parents taught in the Northwest Territories and I spent quite a bit of time sitting at the back of the classroom (the small schools had a single classroom, the bigger schools had 2!) so I'm tempted to say I learned to read by osmosis.



One article dumping on the speed reading programs attracted my ire and the author and I engaged in a rather nasty exchange of message. Basically, the author claimed that no one could read over ~280WPM unless they were only skimming which seriously compromises comprehension. He continually restated that physics said that one can take in more than 7-9 letters in a "fixation" and we are limited to 4-5 fixations per second so no one can read faster than his proclaimed maximum. We sidetracked into saccades and the discussion ended in a mutual decision that the other heretic was wrong and no longer worth wasting electrons on.

Sadly, a collection of deviant data points did not disprove his theory. He was not a fan of Thomas Huxley (the man responsible for "The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.").

I did the cereal box thing at a very young age, too!

I'd have thought that we can take in more than 280 wpm, too, and that many of us do it regularly in very short bursts, reading detailed signs and such. But some of that is probably recognition that doesn't require us to interpret in the ways we would if we don't know what the details are of what we're about to read. In other words, a sign in a window is different than the next paragraph of a novel.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ps67

...I use a font like Roboto Slab or Lexia Dama or Bitter so it is not so evident the lack of ligatures in Kepub.

You could enable ligatures in kepub (though, as with everything,m you gain something and lose something).

[ps67]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

You could enable ligatures in kepub (though, as with everything,m you gain something and lose something).

Yes I used the patch for sometime but letter spacing was wrong, some words had a double space between letters.