Firmware 4.34.20097

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yes, that's true. But word spacing is not an issue with epubs, only with kepubs.

Do you have an opinion on the text quality between the two? I was reading the Standard E-Books website, and it claims that the public domain e-books there will look significantly better on Kobo devices if you use KEPUB compared to EPUB, because the ADE renderer is bad.

I've been reading most of my books as EPUB with one KEPUB I bought from Kobo, and I didn't notice any difference between the two formats, other than the page renumbering and reading statistics options that KEPUB offers. I'm not entirely sure what supposed deficiency exists in the ADE renderer, as it seems fine to me.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Do you have an opinion on the text quality between the two? I was reading the Standard E-Books website, and it claims that the public domain e-books there will look significantly better on Kobo devices if you use KEPUB compared to EPUB, because the ADE renderer is bad.

They have over-complicated formatting. I usually have to "fix" their ebooks.
Books sensibly styled / formatted are fine on epub/ADE and reasonably match my my LO Writer sources or converted Kindle ebooks.
The kepub has some bugs. It uses the wrong conversion factor rendering indents given in anything other than em. The Kobo Aa menu items behave differently. Font sizes render different to epub and may also convert pt to em wrong at times.
I used kepub for a while on Original H2O, then later on Sage. Now I only use epub on Kobo which is similar to epub on Android apps that use the CSS and publisher fonts, Sony PRS-350 and T1 and others.

Is kepub just Kobo's attempt at KFX (which I don't like because of DRM)? The kepub is proprietary. They should ditch it and improve epub support, even offer alternate renderer for non-drm content.

I've gone back to using Standard Books epub and checking/edit each one in Calibre Viewer & Editor. They are too jazzed up. "Look at how clever we are at ebooks!"

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Is kepub just Kobo's attempt at KFX (which I don't like because of DRM)? The kepub is proprietary. They should ditch it and improve epub support, even offer alternate renderer for non-drm content.

Have you done any research at all on the kepub format? It's nothing like the KFX abomination, which kepub pre-dates by many years. Once its DRM is removed you have a perfectly serviceable epub which should be readable by any epub renderer. The kepub renderer is newer and webkit-based so supports a wider range of CSS.

You could even open a kepub in an epub editor if you wanted. It's not a particularly pleasant thing to do because of all the special <span class="koboSpan">s which the kepub renderer uses for registering position in book, but they should be harmless unless, for reasons I fail to grasp, you've created a CSS style for a bare <span>.

[rashkae]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Do you have an opinion on the text quality between the two? I was reading the Standard E-Books website, and it claims that the public domain e-books there will look significantly better on Kobo devices if you use KEPUB compared to EPUB, because the ADE renderer is bad.

I've been reading most of my books as EPUB with one KEPUB I bought from Kobo, and I didn't notice any difference between the two formats, other than the page renumbering and reading statistics options that KEPUB offers. I'm not entirely sure what supposed deficiency exists in the ADE renderer, as it seems fine to me.

The Epub renderer is just slow... there's a slight hesitance in turning pages. But the biggest difference is in books that that have graphical content. Not only is the Epub renderer much slower with those, but the quality of dithering, (to change colour into B&W gradients,) is *much* worse on epub. Kepub can also benefit from Image zoom. Kepubs also have better support for footnote links, that allows the footnote to be displayed in a pop-up.. (Conversely, in Epub, it can be hard to even press the link to the footnote.)

Kepub also has better support for Epub3 features,, including the Epub3 standard for ToC.. (which the epub renderer ignores,, making it unable to handle epub3 files unless those files are generated with backwards epub2 support.)

All of that being said, The epub renderer has fewer ... quirks with page layout ... well simply rendering the content. The epub renderer does not have the same issues with page splits truncating text if line height is too short or there are drop caps in the middle of the page. Justification/Kerning/ligatures are reported to be better (though I am unable to perceive this difference myself.)

Also, the Epub display can appropriately render margins and indents measured in physical units, (like pt or in). Keput uses an assumed fixed DPI for physical measurements that were hard coded in the software when devices were 167DPI.. (so at 300DPI, a 1 in. intent becomes almost half an inch instead.)

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Do you have an opinion on the text quality between the two? I was reading the Standard E-Books website, and it claims that the public domain e-books there will look significantly better on Kobo devices if you use KEPUB compared to EPUB, because the ADE renderer is bad.

I've been reading most of my books as EPUB with one KEPUB I bought from Kobo, and I didn't notice any difference between the two formats, other than the page renumbering and reading statistics options that KEPUB offers. I'm not entirely sure what supposed deficiency exists in the ADE renderer, as it seems fine to me.

The epub renderer is slower, but the layout is better, especially word spacing. The latter is particularly noticeable when you disable hyphenation in your books, as I do. There is a patch that somewhat improves word spacing in kepubs.

The font size between epub and kepub renderer is different, unless you use a patch to fix that.

Also, epubs on a Kobo tend to have larger empty spaces on top and bottom than kepubs. Again, this can be fixed with patches and by editing the widows/orphans setting in both the Kobo conf file and the book css.

As to kepubs having issues with text indents, I don't know about that, because I edit the css in my books, including indents.

I use kepubs on my Sage because I like how fast everything is, and the layout is better on a larger screen. On the Libra I read mostly epubs. The books themselves are the same on both, only the format differs, so I can switch between the two whenever I like.

[Rand Brittain]

The KEPUB renderer also doesn't support soft page breaks, which is why I stopped using it. The only other thing I remember is that it displays emdashes funny for some weird reason.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Have you done any research at all on the kepub format? It's nothing like the KFX abomination,

Of course it's nothing like KFX. I'm suggesting the motivation is related.
* Own brand / design of format. (Though AZW3/KF8 is that as well as KFX. Mobi was bought in)
* Not needing Adobe. (I think Amazon ditched Adobe when they bought Mobipocket).
* Different DRM is an option
* Offer features not on older format, even though an updated device FW could offer them (Enhanced Typesetting KFX Kindle could be on AZW3, epub could have image zoom on Kobo)

I know KFX and kepub only accidentally have the letter k in name in common apart from both being ebook formats.

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

The font size between epub and kepub renderer is different, unless you use a patch to fix that.

The nebulous font settings are a big negative of Kobo for me. The sliders have no numbers of any kind to indicate what the bar positions mean, and the font size differs from book to book, even if the bar is in the same spot sometimes. Is there any way to unify the font settings between books, other than pre-processing every book with Calibre?

From everything I've read, it seems like EPUB is the way to go. I don't care about the KEPUB statistics, I like having physical page numbers, and the formatting appears to be better. The only time I notice EPUB being slow is when I seek back to a previous chapter. I always stop reading at chapter breaks, and I usually want to re-read the last page of the previous chapter to remind myself of what just happened. Turning the page back to the last chapter takes a second or two, but moving between the pages in a chapter is plenty speedy for me.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Is there any way to unify the font settings between books, other than pre-processing every book with Calibre?

No. There are patches for overriding line-height and fonts in the css, but not font sizes, that I know of. That's why I edit the css. It would be beyond annoying to fiddle with the font settings every time I open a new book.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

...the font size differs from book to book, even if the bar is in the same spot sometimes. Is there any way to unify the font settings between books, other than pre-processing every book with Calibre?

That is the book's fault, rather than ePub or kepub. I wish publishers would stop specifying font sizes for body text. That is what is causing your issues.

I like having physical page numbers...

They aren't physical page numbers. There is no physical book. And what is on page 138 of an ePub won't necessarily match what is on page 138 of any particular physical copy of the book. But I do understand liking standardized page numbers.

I prefer kepub for the added features. I find 1 screen = 1 page to be useful in my judging how long it will take me to finish a chapter.

On the other hand, I've never had any issues reading ePubs on my Nooks and could be happy with them.

[wingmongyee]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I prefer kepub for the added features. I find 1 screen = 1 page to be useful in my judging how long it will take me to finish a chapter.

Me too !

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

That is the book's fault, rather than ePub or kepub. I wish publishers would stop specifying font sizes for body text.

Is it then possible to fix this by editing the CSS to remove all font size lines? If the CSS doesn't set the size, does the font slider correspond to the size in points, or...?

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

They aren't physical page numbers. There is no physical book. And what is on page 138 of an ePub won't necessarily match what is on page 138 of any particular physical copy of the book.

Ah, silly me. I figured if you were going to include page numbers, you'd want them to correspond to the print edition. I guess that would make too much sense.

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Is it then possible to fix this by editing the CSS to remove all font size lines? If the CSS doesn't set the size, does the font slider correspond to the size in points, or...?


Ah, silly me. I figured if you were going to include page numbers, you'd want them to correspond to the print edition. I guess that would make too much sense.

Which print edition? Therein lies the absurdity (imo) of fixating on "real" page numbers for ebooks. Of the 400+ ebooks I've read so far this year, all have had multiple dead tree versions listed at The Strorygraph, and every one of those multiple editions has has had a different number of actual physical pages. Which one should be the reference for the "real" page numbers in an ebook?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Is it then possible to fix this by editing the CSS to remove all font size lines? If the CSS doesn't set the size, does the font slider correspond to the size in points, or...?

If you remove ALL font size lines, you'll also remove the sizes from things like headings and footnotes, which may be different than the base font size. IMO that would make the book ugly. I just remove any base font size smaller or bigger than 1em. But that can't be done in bulk.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Is it then possible to fix this by editing the CSS to remove all font size lines? If the CSS doesn't set the size, does the font slider correspond to the size in points, or...?

Yes, you can edit the CSS in the ePub. There may be some automatic way to do it in Calibre, but if so, that is over my head.

Ah, silly me. I figured if you were going to include page numbers, you'd want them to correspond to the print edition. I guess that would make too much sense.

So Stephen King's latest book Fairy Tale is currently available as both a hard cover and ebook. Should they make the ePub pages correspond to that version? What happens when the paperback (which long term will be the much more popular physical version) comes out. Do they recalculate the page numbers?

Suppose they first release it as a trade paperback and then Fairy Tale is made into a movie (very probable) and then a mass market paperback is released. Then what version is the ebook to correspond to?