Adjusting word spacing for justified text – kepub

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I used to not like bookerly compared to Literata, Minion, or Bitter. Not sure if Amazon tweaked it or I just changed, but it looks good and lets me get more lines per page (because we know a screen is a page right Jon?).

Well, my Bookerly is certainly not the newest version. Still, it has always been a bit too wide for my taste (I mean the characters, not line height). I prefer narrower fonts.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I used to not like bookerly compared to Literata, Minion, or Bitter. Not sure if Amazon tweaked it or I just changed, but it looks good and lets me get more lines per page (because we know a screen is a page right Jon?).

Have you tried Literata Book? It has better spacing than vanilla Literata.

I don't have my Kobo upstairs to check lines per page. But I have noticed on kepub, changing from Literata Book to Bookerly increases the page count.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Have you tried Literata Book? It has better spacing than vanilla Literata.

I don't have my Kobo upstairs to check lines per page. But I have noticed on kepub, changing from Literata Book to Bookerly increases the page count.

I did and I recall liking it. I’d actually forgotten there were two, and due to a series of unfortunate events I can’t be sure which I have installed currently so I’ll give it a shot. Worst case I have another font. Best case I get even more lines per page and augment my Sages battery by reducing page turns.

[ZodWallop]

Went and grabbed the Kobo. As you can see, with both fonts set to the same size and line spacing at zero, I get 20 lines on Bookerly and 22 with Literata Book.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I did and I recall liking it. I’d actually forgotten there were two, and due to a series of unfortunate events I can’t be sure which I have installed currently so I’ll give it a shot.

On my Kobo, the font's name displays as Literata Book, so it's obvious which you are using (assuming you didn't pull some Font Forge antics).

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I used to not like bookerly compared to Literata, Minion, or Bitter. Not sure if Amazon tweaked it or I just changed, but it looks good and lets me get more lines per page (because we know a screen is a page right Jon?).

ChareInk gets more text per page then does Bookerly.

[MGlitch]

Ok tried Literata Book, sadly it didn't really get me anything. Yes at the *same* settings it would give me more lines/page, but I needed to adjust it to 1) make it comfortable to read 2) get rid of artifacts from the first line of the next page showing at up the bottom of the current page.

However, I had an idea sparked from looking at these two fonts, I decided to look at Bookerly's line spacing and discovered that (based on what I've read) the ascenders and descenders were incorrectly set, resulting in (I believe) a larger space between lines.

This is based on information from this site http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/Line_Spacing.html I've since corrected the values and I do find that Bookerly now seems to have a smaller amount of space between lines. Which makes sense based on the adjustments I made as the values that were edited were all decreased. I will admit that this is not an area where I have a great knowledge, so perhaps I'm mistaken in my evaluation of the information. But the net result is I now have a Bookerly font which gives me more lines per page than the one that Amazon distribtues and presumably uses on their Kindles.

As to why Amazon would not follow this supposed standard I can't say, perhaps they felt it looked better, or perhaps Kindles take the difference into consideration when rendering text. Note I'm honestly not trying to assign any nefarious mentality to Amazaon I'm just reporting what I have found and speculating as to why they would do this.

[JSWolf]

I changed the line spacing in the metrics when I created ChareInk. On a Kindle, it reduces the wasted line space when reading a KF8 eBook. The problem with the Kindle is that Amazon messed up KFX big time so that it forces the line height to fixed no matter what the font says.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I changed the line spacing in the metrics when I created ChareInk. On a Kindle, it reduces the wasted line space when reading a KF8 eBook. The problem with the Kindle is that Amazon messed up KFX big time so that it forces the line height to fixed no matter what the font says.

That's a shame for Kindle users.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

ChareInk gets more text per page then does Bookerly.

I tried CharInk, and I run into basically the same issue I had with Literata Book (though at the same setting I had my modified Bookerly, CharInk did not present the artifact issue so kudos there). I've not tried adjusting it up, but based on what I see it would certainly end up being a wash for me. I didn't mess around with them as I've now spent well over two hours tweaking the font size and line spacing sliders and I'm rather tired of doing so only to come to reverse it. Again I wish Kobo introduced a method to save these settings. Alas, parhaps in a future firmware.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

Ok tried Literata Book, sadly it didn't really get me anything. Yes at the *same* settings it would give me more lines/page, but I needed to adjust it to 1) make it comfortable to read 2) get rid of artifacts from the first line of the next page showing at up the bottom of the current page.

Weird. I have my line spacing set to 0 (or whatever the far left side of the slider is) and I don't have that problem.

I remember that artifacting issue. Isn't it something to do with stylesheets in kepub having negative margins or something? There was a patch that fixed it.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Weird. I have my line spacing set to 0 (or whatever the far left side of the slider is) and I don't have that problem.

I remember that artifacting issue. Isn't it something to do with stylesheets in kepub having negative margins or something? There was a patch that fixed it.

I think there used to be a patch, but it was discontinued. I also use the my line 24 patch, which I believe you don't, so our line spacing options would be different. I also modified the patch to reclaim top and bottom space.

For me text is very much edge to edge of my Sage. The top bit of ' hits the edge of the top bezel, while the bottom of , hits the edge of the bottom bezel. i literally can't fit the NanoClock mod even at its smallest settings on screen without it blocking text.

[Lykke]

All right, I switched all my books over to ePub. I figured I can do a bulk-replace in the ePub files that have body text left-aligned. I made a saved search in Calibre so that whenever I add a new Norwegian ePub it will just take two seconds. So my OCD should now be fixed (apologize to anyone who *actually* suffers from OCD).

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Lykke

I notice that the word spacing for justified text while reading kepub is noticably larger than for epub. Not so much for English, but very noticeable when reading Norwegian ebooks (also with a hyphenation dictionary installed). Is it possible to reduce the word spacing somehow? (For some reason Norwegian books will only justify for kepub, not epub).

Aside from all the hyphenation and left align stuff, back to your original question ...

Have you experimented with adding this to your CSS file for kepubs?:

word-spacing: -0.05em;

trying different values for the red bit.

If you find it helps, both calibre drivers (KoboTouch, KoboTouchExtended) already make it easy to auto-add during the calibre send-to-device process.

In fact, it may even be suitable as a new kobopatch if enough users think it does help kepub word-spacing.

Here's a comparison of what it looks like without/with the word-spacing tweak on my KA1:

[MGlitch]

I’d really appreciate it if it became a patch. Easier to manage from a user perspective, and no need to reimport books.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

I’d really appreciate it if it became a patch. Easier to manage from a user perspective, and no need to reimport books.

Ditto.