Homogeneous fonts in viewer

[kobobobo]

Hi Everyone,

How can I achieve a homogeneous font size, type, boldness, in all the books which I open wih Viewer? I tried to convert them with embedded font and also tried to add font in Editor, but all the books have different font size and/or font type or sometimes some paragraph are bold in a book. I tried to make the bold and undo it. I even exported in docx and set to bold and undo it in Libreoffice Writer.

[hobnail]

If you don't mind "destroying" the font sizes for things like the copyright page, table of contents, etc. you can open the .css file(s) and remove all font-size: lines with a regular expression. For novels the only part of the book that matters to me is the chapters; there aren't any footnotes or figure captions or whatnot that should be a different size.

You can also preprocess the book by using calibre's convert book thing and convert it to the same format, and set up the conversion parameters for something you like. Even though it says it will normalize the font size (I use 1em) there are still places where it leaves the original, or something. After I do that then I remove the font-size: lines. I'm using a Kobo so almost all of my books start out in Kindle format and I use calibre to convert them to epub. Doing this conversion is also required for the really brain dead formatting where they've embedded style= lines in the html; calibre will move all of that into the .css file.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by kobobobo

Hi Everyone,

How can I achieve a homogeneous font size, type, boldness, in all the books which I open wih Viewer? I tried to convert them with embedded font and also tried to add font in Editor, but all the books have different font size and/or font type or sometimes some paragraph are bold in a book. I tried to make the bold and undo it. I even exported in docx and set to bold and undo it in Libreoffice Writer.

By editing each individual book with the editor. There are no overall rules, because each book is coded differently.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

By editing each individual book with the editor. There are no overall rules, because each book is coded differently.

My procedure works quite well even though it is an overall rule. In the Common Options for book conversion I have Disable Font Resize Rescaling unchecked and Base Font Size set at 0.0pt. Minimum Line Height is set to 120%. In the Styling tab I have checked all 5 boxes at the bottom.

I had been fixing them individually but I had to reinstall Windows recently and decided to try just removing the font-size: lines and it works.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by hobnail

My procedure works quite well even though it is an overall rule. In the Common Options for book conversion I have Disable Font Resize Rescaling unchecked and Base Font Size set at 0.0pt. Minimum Line Height is set to 120%. In the Styling tab I have checked all 5 boxes at the bottom.

I had been fixing them individually but I had to reinstall Windows recently and decided to try just removing the font-size: lines and it works.

The sledgehammer approach is like throwing the child out with the bathwater. Personally I don't want to remove ALL font-sizes and margins from a book. The result will be more like a text file than a book. YMMV.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

The sledgehammer approach is like throwing the child out with the bathwater. Personally I don't want to remove ALL font-sizes and margins from a book. The result will be more like a text file than a book. YMMV.

These are novels. Except for the chapter title the vast majority of novels have little to no font size changes.

[theducks]

I agree with Hobnail, BUT do not assume there wasn't a reason and just nuke'em. OSFA is a myth.
Lots of valid reasons an author might style body text.
Signs, Shouting, Location (Time & Place).

Look first. If in doubt Comment out instead of nuke Really easy to undo.
/*font-size: 1.2em; */

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by theducks

I agree with Hobnail, BUT do not assume there wasn't a reason and just nuke'em. OSFA is a myth.
Lots of valid reasons an author might style body text.
Signs, Shouting, Location (Time & Place).

Look first. If in doubt Comment out instead of nuke Really easy to undo.
/*font-size: 1.2em; */

I agree. So far I haven't encountered any font size changes for things like that; they use bold, italics, bold+italics, and may combine those with underlining. The one place where things could be somewhat messed up is if they embed a monospace font or sans serif font for styling certain stuff. But so far I haven't had any books that have turned out confusing by having the fonts stripped from them.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by hobnail

But so far I haven't had any books that have turned out confusing by having the fonts stripped from them.

They may not be confusing, but they're no longer nice-looking, that's for sure. I get that's not important to you; but it may be important to the OP.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

They may not be confusing, but they're no longer nice-looking, that's for sure. I get that's not important to you; but it may be important to the OP.

Since novels don't use much if any styling they turn out looking fine. The ereader's (kobo) built in css does a good job. The two built in things I want overridden, text-align:justified and a blank line between paragraphs, is fixed by calibre during the conversion.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by hobnail

Since novels don't use much if any styling they turn out looking fine.

Not in my experience. Or perhaps we read different novels.

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Not in my experience. Or perhaps we read different novels.

I'm typically downloading well over 7 free books a week by way of ereaderiq.com so I'm very glad to have reduced the time I spend fixing their formatting. So far the only thing that's "lost in translation" is the chapter titles when they use p tags; 1em font size that's the same as the running text, but it's easy to see it's the chapter title with the other formatting for it. I've even been reading some LitRPG books and their formatting for the RPG stuff comes out perfectly fine; a combination of bold, italic bold, and italic.

The page on the right is the original AZW3. This is with calibre's viewer, but no different than on my kobo.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by hobnail

I'm typically downloading well over 7 free books a week by way of ereaderiq.com so I'm very glad to have reduced the time I spend fixing their formatting. So far the only thing that's "lost in translation" is the chapter titles when they use p tags; 1em font size that's the same as the running text, but it's easy to see it's the chapter title with the other formatting for it. I've even been reading some LitRPG books and their formatting for the RPG stuff comes out perfectly fine; a combination of bold, italic bold, and italic.

The page on the right is the original AZW3. This is with calibre's viewer, but no different than on my kobo.

Most freebies on ereaderiq have pretty simple formatting. I stopped reading them years ago, as most of them aren't particularly good. I do read self-published stuff in addition to tradpubs, but they're generally not free.

Of course not every book suffers from the sledgehammer removal of font sizes and margins, but many of those I've read would. Letters, diary entries, computer text, chapter quotes, songs, verses, section breaks and so on. And yes, chapter titles. All this is important for me to be able to enjoy a book.