BookShelves — Native EPUB Reader for macOS and iOS (looking for feedback)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by QuietShelfLife

Good to hear the paragraph spacing is working for you now.

On the two issues:

1. Header/bottom spacing -- noted. I'll look at tightening the vertical space on iPhone where screen real estate matters most.

2. Font weight slider -- could you post a screenshot of what you're seeing? I want to make sure I'm looking at the same thing. The bold toggle on iOS is a simple on/off right now, not a slider, so I may be misunderstanding which control you mean.

Thanks for testing, Jon.

The font weight slider goes from normal which is no weight adjustment to bold which is too much. There needs to be fine control like there is on Kobo Readers.

The Font Weight slider is under Reading Mode and above Justify Text.

[QuietShelfLife]

The weight slider adapts to the font you're using -- some fonts support more steps than others. With the default font or Publisher Font, there are only two stops (Normal and Bold) because those fonts only ship two weights.

If you want more granular control, try switching to one of the variable fonts like Literata, Noto Serif, or Atkinson Hyperlegible. Those give you five weight steps from Lightest through Boldest. Merriweather and Lora also have intermediate steps.

It works this way because setting a weight the font doesn't actually have just gets clamped by the browser to the nearest available weight -- you'd see the slider move but nothing change on screen. So the stops are limited to what each font genuinely supports.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by QuietShelfLife

The weight slider adapts to the font you're using -- some fonts support more steps than others. With the default font or Publisher Font, there are only two stops (Normal and Bold) because those fonts only ship two weights.

If you want more granular control, try switching to one of the variable fonts like Literata, Noto Serif, or Atkinson Hyperlegible. Those give you five weight steps from Lightest through Boldest. Merriweather and Lora also have intermediate steps.

It works this way because setting a weight the font doesn't actually have just gets clamped by the browser to the nearest available weight -- you'd see the slider move but nothing change on screen. So the stops are limited to what each font genuinely supports.

That's 100% WRONG! This post says exactly how to do the font weight properly.

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I think that JSWolf means that adjusting the weight of the font used to display the text should not be done by changing which variant of a font is used as the 'regular' text font, but by programmatically adjusting the weight of all the variants.

So if, say, Times New Roman is selected as the font for text display, -Regular should be used for ordinary text, and -Bold for bold text, etc.

But if the font weight control is used to indicate that text should be 'bolder', all weights of Times New Roman should programmatically be made bolder.

Plain text should still be Times New Roman-Regular, but made programmatically bolder
Bold text should still be Times New Roman-Bold, but made programmatically bolder

It's a different way of looking at how that control should be implemented.

The idea is, I think, that the font family should just control the font family used. Which variant of a font family should be used should be just the usual -Regular, -Bold, -Italic, etc.

The weight control should control how much artificial weight is added to each variant.

At least, this is my understanding of JSWolf's opinion. I hope he'll correct me if I'm wrong.

This is exactly how the font weight is to be done. It's not done the way you are doing it.

[petrjahoda]

Hey QuietShelfLife, here's how I did it in justread:
1. A slider controls the font weight from 100 to 900. If the font includes that exact weight, it uses it directly for the cleanest rendering. If not, it generates one. So the user just slides left or right and the text gets thinner or thicker.
2. Bold text is always pushed beyond the current weight, so it stays visibly bolder than the surrounding text no matter where the slider sits.

Maybe you can do it somehow similar.