latest kobo android app - a disastrous upgrade!

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For me, it's that 1.2 is a comfortable reading setting, ascenders and descenders have a gap between them

There cannot be a single "best" value, the line spacing varies between fonts, depending on how they are designed. For some font a line spacing of 1 may cause ascenders and descenders to just touch, for a different font they may overlap with the same value, and for yet another font there may be a gap between them. Line spacing is a bit like font size.

And this is not a Kobo issue/feature, it's just the way fonts work.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There cannot be a single "best" value, the line spacing varies between fonts, depending on how they are designed. For some font a line spacing of 1 may cause ascenders and descenders to just touch, for a different font they may overlap with the same value, and for yet another font there may be a gap between them. Line spacing is a bit like font size.

And this is not a Kobo issue/feature, it's just the way fonts work.

which supports the case that if an app is going to offer a choice of fonts and font sizes then it is poor design to not also offer control over line spacng .

I can live with apps that "know best" if that consistently make smart choices, but then they combine poor choices with a take it or leave it attitude, well...

The Kindle fire native reader app has just 3 line spacing options, no slider for fine tuning, but they all look OK to me -it has an acceptable layout on all the fonts that I've tried, and it has a good range of font sizes.

If it accepted epub I would look no further but it doesn't and for reasons that I've aired elsewhere i don't want have to convert my tweaked epub reading copies to azw,
[To restate why: it is because calibre wont let me run that conversion, unless I lose my valued original-epub backups from its library. it insists on making the azw from the original untweaked epub instead.]

The Kobo android app has 3 fonts, which all look much the same, and NO line space controls, which is poor, and which is far worse than what they offer on their own dedicated readers.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Jellby

There cannot be a single "best" value, the line spacing varies between fonts, depending on how they are designed. For some font a line spacing of 1 may cause ascenders and descenders to just touch, for a different font they may overlap with the same value, and for yet another font there may be a gap between them. Line spacing is a bit like font size.

And this is not a Kobo issue/feature, it's just the way fonts work.

Given that I don't use a wide variety of fonts for reading, that value is the one that works best for me. Just to be boring, I use 1em as the default size for body text though I've seen ebooks that use values from .72 to 1.33 for a body text default size. Again, the nice thing with epubs where you can personalize them.

Regards,
David

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Given that I don't use a wide variety of fonts for reading, that value is the one that works best for me. Just to be boring, I use 1em as the default size for body text though I've seen ebooks that use values from .72 to 1.33 for a body text default size. Again, the nice thing with epubs where you can personalize them.

Regards,
David

I used to obsessively set 1em throughout all books before beginning to read them, but I think many of the reader apps auto-compensate. So mostly I can flip between a book using 1em and one using 0.8333 & they look the same on a tablet. (not so in Sigil however).
There's also a common setup in when you end up back at 1 - you see an overall body font size set at 1.2, then individual para classes set at 0.8333. So nowadays I tend to leave them both as-is & let then cancel each other out!