Kobalt: an alternative reader app for Kobo devices

[Dal Bhat]

Originally Posted by onlion

I sugested that design and I like it but that showing of the Kobalt logo and ofter the book cover with a flash bothered me aswell but I didn't wanna bother the developer with my personal requests so I asked claude to fix it for me and it did. I asked claude to give me a file to share the changes it made. it gave me this. So hopefuly the Dev can fix that anoying flashing. I am also aganist the adding an option for everything aproach. This would just turn the app into Koreader and we already have one so might aswell just use that.

He says he's fixed it for Beta 8, so we'll see. I rolled back to Beta 6 in the mean time.

I still prefer just doing away with it. I don' need to see a cover there because I just tapped the cover to make the book open. It adds nothing to the experience of reading the book really. For me, anyway.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by fogice

I feel more confused than I was a couple of hours ago. You guys are more expert than me, so explain why the following is incorrect:

In order to protect a widow, a line at the end of the previous page is moved to the top of the next page. This means that the text on the previous page does not flow to the bottom of the page. By implementing vertical justification, the line spacing is expanded to the point where the last line on the page is placed at the bottom of the text area.

Is this wrong? And if not, why don't people see it as a good idea (except for Sirtel, who already said he wants his line height to remain constant)? And how does "widows=1" fix anything? I was trying to read a book with w/o protection turned off, and I had a page that was just the second half of one hyphenated word. Ugly.

The problem is that if you have widows and orphans on and you use vertical justification, the line spacing can get changed and a lot of us do not like this. It's a terrible option to change the space between lines. If there's an option to turn off windows & orphans, then the vertical justification feature can just be removed as it's not needed.

[onlion]

Originally Posted by Dal Bhat

He says he's fixed it for Beta 8, so we'll see. I rolled back to Beta 6 in the mean time.

I still prefer just doing away with it. I don' need to see a cover there because I just tapped the cover to make the book open. It adds nothing to the experience of reading the book really. For me, anyway.

Yeah it adds more to the visuals. I just like the feeling of it being native like rather than a 3rd party addon. This was the thing in my mind when I suggested it. 20261109_164131_1.avi

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by onlion

Yeah it adds more to the visuals. I just like the feeling of it being native like rather than a 3rd party addon. This was the thing in my mind when I suggested it. Attachment 227295

I don't see that being of any use. Why do you want to see a thumbnail while the book loads? That just makes the book load time take longer. Please ask for this feature to be removed.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is that if you have widows and orphans on and you use vertical justification, the line spacing can get changed and a lot of us do not like this. It's a terrible option to change the space between lines. If there's an option to turn off windows & orphans, then the vertical justification feature can just be removed as it's not needed.

Except there are people who actually want both widows/orphans protection and vertical justification.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Except there are people who actually want both widows/orphans protection and vertical justification.

I don't get why. Having different line heights can be rather annoying.

Can you explain why?

[fogice]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem is that if you have widows and orphans on and you use vertical justification, the line spacing can get changed and a lot of us do not like this. It's a terrible option to change the space between lines. If there's an option to turn off windows & orphans, then the vertical justification feature can just be removed as it's not needed.

Dude. Stop assuming that your preferences are the same as everyone else's preferences. I see this continually from you.

There are separate settings for vertical justification and for widow/orphan control. Especially in 2 column mode, it is nice for the bottom lines to line up. I like that more than I care about the spaces between the lines. I'm not forcing my preference on you, it's a setting.

Also, for those of you who have been editing in your own CSS, take a look at Settings > Styling > Book normalization. You can use the options there to:

• override page margins
• remove blank space at the beginning of chapters
• remove drop caps
• remove lines between paragraphs
• set first-line indents

And then elsewhere you can put in your preference for what those settings should be. You may still want to hand-edit your ebooks, but this increases the accessibility of these settings to more casual users.

[MrSilverstrike]

I've been keeping an eye on this thread for a bit, but I do think it's worth clarifying how vertical justification works.

Vertical justification is careful on purpose. It only closes small gaps at the bottom of a page. I've seen some comments here about potential confusion, so let me lay out how the feature works here:

Expand line height changes a page only when all of these are true:

- The page has at least 6 lines of normal text.
- The empty space is at most 1/8 of the page height.
- The space between any two lines would grow by at most 1/8 of a line, on average.

For example, on a page of about 30 lines, it can fill a gap of up to about 3 to 4 lines. On a page of about 10 lines, it can fill only about 1 line.

Center content vertically centers a page only when the text already fills at least 90% of the page height. The empty space must be 10% or less.

Both modes always leave a page alone if:

- it has footnotes at the bottom
- it has a picture, table or other block that runs onto the next page
- it has a picture with its caption that would be split across pages
- it has content the feature doesn’t recognise

The last page of a chapter is usually much shorter than a full page, so it stays as it is. Also, page breaks stay the same. Depending on how your book is formatted, results may vary.

These are extra options that I'm making available in Kobalt, but they may not always work as expected given the markup of the book you're viewing. Alas, I cannot literally fix every book under the sun.

---

Then, a few notes:

- Please be patient for the next beta release. Understand that it will normally take about a week between beta releases, unless it's necessary to release a hotfix because there's a major issue with a beta release. And even then, it's a beta, there will be bugs. No need to create a patch or fork for anything yet, reporting the issue is sufficient.

- Don't forget: this is all still actively being worked on by me after work hours (and programming is already my day job), and I've frankly been releasing beta builds at an insane pace so far. Essentially all of my free time has gone into Kobalt over the last six weeks or so. I just want to adjust expectations for a bit... this fast pace will be the exception to the rule.

- And this one's for Jon: consider for a moment, please, that people may have different tastes and approaches to how they want things to work. Have you tried Kobalt? It sounds like you haven't yet, based on your comments. Please do so! If you have meaningful feedback I'd be happy to hear what you have to say, but if all you have to say is "just remove feature X lol" then I hope you realize that's not very helpful. Thanks.

[onlion]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I don't see that being of any use. Why do you want to see a thumbnail while the book loads? That just makes the book load time take longer. Please ask for this feature to be removed.

I don't think this changes the loading time. it just changes the image it calls, the image is already there. But if the dev thinks it slows down the loading he can just remove it. its not a big problem for me I can add it back myself later.

[MrSilverstrike]

Originally Posted by onlion

I don't think this changes the loading time. it just changes the image it calls, the image is already there. But if the dev thinks it slows down the loading he can just remove it. its not a big problem for me I can add it back myself later.

You're correct: it just shows the image that is already loaded. It's loading in the higher resolution image that causes the flicker in beta 7, and that's no longer present in (the upcoming) beta 8

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I don't get why. Having different line heights can be rather annoying.

Can you explain why?

It's not possible to explain different preferences. Like, you hate apples, but I love apples. You like the red color, but I like the blue color. And so on. You cannot explain those things; they just are.

[JSWolf]

delete post

[fogice]

Originally Posted by MrSilverstrike

Expand line height changes a page only when all of these are true:

- The page has at least 6 lines of normal text.
- The empty space is at most 1/8 of the page height.
- The space between any two lines would grow by at most 1/8 of a line, on average.

Thanks so much for the clarification. I think that widow/orphan control might sometimes cause the condition 3 to trigger. And why some first chapter pages also don't get adjusted. IMO, I would rather have those lines stretched to the bottom at the cost of additional space increases.

Obviously, the final decision is yours. I am very impressed by the amount of time, effort, and responsiveness you have put into this project, and no one would question if you stepped back your speed a bit. I would use the current version as is with no complaints; I'm just trying to help make Kobalt the best it can be.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by fogice

Also, for those of you who have been editing in your own CSS, take a look at Settings > Styling > Book normalization. You can use the options there to:

• override page margins
• remove blank space at the beginning of chapters
• remove drop caps
• remove lines between paragraphs
• set first-line indents

And then elsewhere you can put in your preference for what those settings should be. You may still want to hand-edit your ebooks, but this increases the accessibility of these settings to more casual users.

That's very nice. I'm still going to edit my books, though, as I don't really want to depend on any one app for reading. One day I might get an ereader where it's not possible to install Kobalt; also apps get abandoned all the time for various reasons (life happens to the best of us...), and apps with a single developer are even more likely to be orphaned some day.

The above doesn't mean Kobalt isn't a great option for reading. Of course it is. I just prefer not to keep all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by fogice

I would use the current version as is with no complaints.

Ditto.