[Device Plugin] Kobo Touch Extended Driver

[bernard.ryefield]

Originally Posted by jgoguen

New version posted. If I recall the update schedules correctly, calibre should start offering it sometime in the next hour or so. Amazing how well things work when you give it the right data!

Someone tell Microsoft 1991 called, they want their "Unicode is in beta" nonsense back.

Thanks to everyone who tested multiple versions, Kovid for pointing me at calibre.prints(), and the rest of you for your patience with this. Hopefully this is the last time Unicode is an issue here before Python 2 calibre is retired.

You're welcome! Oh the joys of programming! Thank you and stay safe!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by davidfor

MS likes to screw with Windows at least once a year.

I've never had a problem connecting my H2O to Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 from the first version to 1903. If MS was changing things enough, I should have had some issue connecting the H2O.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've never had a problem connecting my H2O to Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 from the first version to 1903. If MS was changing things enough, I should have had some issue connecting the H2O.

You never had the joy of running Windows 10 Anniversary Update where due to some changes in the MBR handling, Windows would not see the Kobo's exposed partition? There was a workaround involving the use of the Minitool Partition Wizard to reformat the partition triggering a rebuild. This was a bug that made it through several Windows Insider previews to the release despite the number of complaints and upvotes on the complaints. Admittedly, this was better than the blue screen when connecting a Kindle which also made it from the Insider Previews to the Anniversary Update release.

[Selenia]

Hello Everyone,
I am experiencing a strange problem with the versions of KoboTouchExtended after version 3.1.5. After sending some epubs tot my Kobo Aura One with Calibre I have noticed the formatting is corrupted in several places. When comparing the file on the ereader with the original I found that besides the usual <span> tags there were some odd <p> tags inserted as well, hence the problems. Reverted back to 3.1.5 and transfered the same file again and all is well.
Any thoughts what could be the cause?

Best regards,
Selenia

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

You never had the joy of running Windows 10 Anniversary Update where due to some changes in the MBR handling, Windows would not see the Kobo's exposed partition? There was a workaround involving the use of the Minitool Partition Wizard to reformat the partition triggering a rebuild. This was a bug that made it through several Windows Insider previews to the release despite the number of complaints and upvotes on the complaints. Admittedly, this was better than the blue screen when connecting a Kindle which also made it from the Insider Previews to the Anniversary Update release.

That one I did skip. I turned off updates because of it,

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Selenia

Hello Everyone,
I am experiencing a strange problem with the versions of KoboTouchExtended after version 3.1.5. After sending some epubs tot my Kobo Aura One with Calibre I have noticed the formatting is corrupted in several places. When comparing the file on the ereader with the original I found that besides the usual <span> tags there were some odd <p> tags inserted as well, hence the problems. Reverted back to 3.1.5 and transfered the same file again and all is well.
Any thoughts what could be the cause?

Best regards,
Selenia

Try the following...

Use the ScrambleEbook plugin on the ePub and see if the latest Extended Driver still have a problem with it. If so, post the scrambled ePub so it can be looked in and mention where the problem is.

[jgoguen]

Post both the scrambled ePub and the KePub generated from it.

[Selenia]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Try the following...

Use the ScrambleEbook plugin on the ePub and see if the latest Extended Driver still have a problem with it. If so, post the scrambled ePub so it can be looked in and mention where the problem is.

Hi JSWolf and jgoguen,
I have done that and attached both files.
If you look at the entry Ykrwujygd wihich internally is Copyright.xhtml, the original has 5 <p>-tags and the kepub has 9 <p>-tags. There are more difference, but these were the first I have noticed. Transfer with Calibre 4.16 and KoboTouchExtended 3.2.7

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Selenia

Hi JSWolf and jgoguen,
I have done that and attached both files.
If you look at the entry Ykrwujygd wihich internally is Copyright.xhtml, the original has 5 <p>-tags and the kepub has 9 <p>-tags. There are more difference, but these were the first I have noticed. Transfer with Calibre 4.16 and KoboTouchExtended 3.2.7

I took a quick look at your files. In copyright.xhtml. It appears that each time a <br/> appears, it was replaced with a <br/></p> and then the </p> at the end of the paragraph was replaced with a <p></p>. This also screwed up the centering and italics for those fragments.

Also why the 2 extra stylesheets featuring mostly font-family declarations for the Dark Courier monospace fonts plus adding those font-family items to the volkorn.css and stylesheet.css stylesheets? Once wasn't enough?

I did a quick test with kepubify on the original scrambled file and it did not add those extra </p>s and it left the stylesheets alone.

[Selenia]

Hi David,

The Dark Courier declarations are added automatically with the aid of kobo_extra.css placed on the reader. It seems to appear as stylehacks.css in the kepub. I forgot about that, but it did not seem to cause any issues when not needed. I have also activated the Disable hyphenation feature in the KoboTouchExtended driver which created no-hyphens.css. The DarkCourier declarations are placed in this file as well, no idea why. But again, this never caused any issues that I am aware off.
I have never used kepubify, but tried it and converted the file. It seems okay to me, but the two extra stylesheets are not in it.
Do you think these can cause the issue, or is it possibly something in the KoboTouchExtended driver? As stated, when transferring with 3.1.5. all is as expected and the extra two extra stylesheets are present in that kepub as well.

Best regards,
Rudi

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Selenia

Hi David,

The Dark Courier declarations are added automatically with the aid of kobo_extra.css placed on the reader. It seems to appear as stylehacks.css in the kepub. I forgot about that, but it did not seem to cause any issues when not needed. I have also activated the Disable hyphenation feature in the KoboTouchExtended driver which created no-hyphens.css. The DarkCourier declarations are placed in this file as well, no idea why. But again, this never caused any issues that I am aware off.
I have never used kepubify, but tried it and converted the file. It seems okay to me, but the two extra stylesheets are not in it.
Do you think these can cause the issue, or is it possibly something in the KoboTouchExtended driver? As stated, when transferring with 3.1.5. all is as expected and the extra two extra stylesheets are present in that kepub as well.

Best regards,
Rudi

I think that the extra CSS bits added are just annoying to me since I prefer simple clean CSS and regard any programs modifying my CSS as anathema. For what's it worth, the mysterious conversion of <br/> to <br/></p> and then adding a <p> before the </p> is the main issue I saw in your scrambled kepub.

Kepubify can add extra stylesheet information but I've never used it. As for adding the Dark Courier font, I'd suggest using the KoboPatch to change the search name for a monospace font in the fonts directory to Dark from the default Courier.

[davidfor]

The addition of the extra css isn't causing the problem. It might cause other problems, but, they will be when the book is rendered on the device.

What it looks like is that the parsing of the text has changed. Somewhere there is something that is seeing the "<br/>" and deciding a "</p>" is needed after it. The extra "<p>" is added later, probably as part of a beautify function, to fix the error cause by having unbalanced tags.

I can see the changes in the plugin to get the code out of the books and parsing it. I haven't dug down to see exactly what else is going.

[Selenia]

Originally Posted by davidfor

The addition of the extra css isn't causing the problem. It might cause other problems, but, they will be when the book is rendered on the device.

What it looks like is that the parsing of the text has changed. Somewhere there is something that is seeing the "<br/>" and deciding a "</p>" is needed after it. The extra "<p>" is added later, probably as part of a beautify function, to fix the error cause by having unbalanced tags.

I can see the changes in the plugin to get the code out of the books and parsing it. I haven't dug down to see exactly what else is going.

Thanks for the input so far. I have looked through the epub more closely and it seems all the formatting differences are probably caused by this same issue. In total there are 7 extra <p>-tags in the whole file. The other ones in Hoodstuk08.xhtml and Hoofdstuk20.xhtml.
There are 26 <br/>-tags in the epub and only some of them seem to be affected.
@DNSB
I will have a look at KoboPatch, but I do not know if I am comfortable with changing the original firmware on my reader.

[JSWolf]

@Selenia Install the epubcheck Editor plugin and load the ePub into the editor and use epubcheck to check for any errors. If you have any errors, fix them until epubcheck shows no errors and then try the conversion to KePub. The problem can be that conversion to KePub probably expects a structurally error free eBook to function properly.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

@Selenia Install the epubcheck Editor plugin and load the ePub into the editor and use epubcheck to check for any errors. If you have any errors, fix them until epubcheck shows no errors and then try the conversion to KePub. The problem can be that conversion to KePub probably expects a structurally error free eBook to function properly.

Jon, no matter how much you keep repeating it, epubcheck for this sort of thing is a waste of time. The calibre editor error check will find all errors that could cause problems to the driver. And this is not an error in the book. Don't you think I would have said? I mean, I've gone to the work of checking the driver code, don't you think I would have checked for errors in the book? And as it worked for a previous version of the driver, the pretty much means it is a change in the driver.

If you think it is so important to run epubcheck over the book, it has been posted. How about you downloading the book and proving how useful epubcheck is by posting the error that are causing the problems.