Kobo ereaders nearly perfect or extremely buggy?

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

We returned our Kobo Glo because we could not adjust the font size for the ebooks, which was a deal breaker for my husband.

Sometimes the font size would adjust, other times we had to adjust the size, close the book, and re-open it.

I had a few formatting issues and file organization issues but the font size bug was the final straw.

Unfortunately, its hard to call that a Kobo bug.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Unfortunately, its hard to call that a Kobo bug.

i disagree - with my old sony readers - they would override book css & give a uniform reading experience.. I never needed to know about line-heights CSS or how to tweak it.

Kobo have chosen to let book settings over-ride device seeings - that is a deliberate choice - & personally I call it a bug.
A device that is advertised as " you can adjust..." should do what it says - all the time.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by cybmole

A device that is advertised as " you can adjust..." should do what it says - all the time.

Hmm, it also says it can hold thousands of books .... but when I purchased my Kobo it didn't. I guess that's a bug, in your ballpark

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cybmole

Kobo have chosen to let book settings over-ride device seeings - that is a deliberate choice - & personally I call it a bug.

Deliberate choices are not bugs. Bugs are ways in which things don't operate as intended, this is intended.

"It's not a bug, it's a usability feature".

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i disagree - with my old sony readers - they would override book css & give a uniform reading experience.. I never needed to know about line-heights CSS or how to tweak it.

Kobo have chosen to let book settings over-ride device seeings - that is a deliberate choice - & personally I call it a bug.
A device that is advertised as " you can adjust..." should do what it says - all the time.

I'd have to disagree. Kobo choose to respect the settings chosen by the producer of the ebook. It's hard to call this a bug. A bad design decision, maybe.

So far I've found only 3 ebooks where some cornmeal for brains specified the fonts size in pixels so they could not be adjusted. Depending on the publisher, you might find yourself having to adjust the font size once in a book but I have never found a book where I had to power cycle the ereader before it would adjust the font size.

Personally, I prefer the way that Kobo lets the ebook/publisher set the appearance of the ebook. I've used other ereaders and ereader application that disregarded the ebook's styling which led to things like tiny images pasted up in the upper left corner when the CSS was trying to use the full screen for a centered image, chapter headings that were against the left margin and marginally larger than the body text instead of being centered and double the text size, paragraphs indents that were disregarded, etc. Once I've edited an ebook to the style I want, my Kobo ereaders display the text correctly in almost every instance.

As an example, I recently purchased Wen Spencer's Wood Sprites. The chapter heading is a graphic with either a single line or a double line of text. On my Aura HD, the graphics were on the small side but a simple edit to add two classes specifying the height of the graphic (one for single line, one for double line) and the chapter headings now display on a 600x800, 1024x758 or 1040x1440 screen using the same % of the screen width/height. They also display correctly on an iPad Air and Nexus 7 HD using DLReader and/or the Kobo app.

Regards,
David

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Unfortunately, its hard to call that a Kobo bug.

Based off the comments I've read it sounds like if the font size is embedded in the epub file, Kobo would not adjust the font to a larger or smaller size?

If that is the case, then maybe a message should have appeared on the screen letting us know why we could not increase/decrease the font, instead of crashing the reader.

On the Sony readers we were always able to adjust the font size. Almost every ebook I've purchased has embedded font sizes in the css file. The feature to adjust the font size is nearly useless if no one can use it without having to reformat their epubs.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

The feature to adjust the font size is nearly useless if no one can use it without having to reformat their epubs.

The message is that those epubs that specify a fixed font size are broken.

It's like a fridge where you can store the milk once opened. Someone comes with some milk in a plastic bag and claims that if he stores the open bag in the fridge it will spill over, so the fridge is "buggy". The solution is putting the milk in a proper container (a bottle or even a box) and store that in the fridge.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

Based off the comments I've read it sounds like if the font size is embedded in the epub file, Kobo would not adjust the font to a larger or smaller size?

If that is the case, then maybe a message should have appeared on the screen letting us know why we could not increase/decrease the font, instead of crashing the reader.

On the Sony readers we were always able to adjust the font size. Almost every ebook I've purchased has embedded font sizes in the css file. The feature to adjust the font size is nearly useless if no one can use it without having to reformat their epubs.

I would correct your first sentence to say if the font size is specified in absolute values (pixels, points, cm, etc.), they will not be adjustable As one web site warns:

Note: Defining font sizes in pixel is not accessible, because the user cannot
change the font size from the browser. (For example, users with limited
vision may wish to set the font size much larger than the size chosen by
a web designer.) Therefore, avoid using pixels for font sizes if you wish
to create an inclusive design.

However, I've seen very few ebooks using fixed font sizes -- three at my last count, two of which were from self-published authors. With relative font sizes, what font size is the starting font size can and does vary quite widely so you may need to use the slider to set the body text font to a comfortable size.

Personally, I do specify font sizes in my stock CSS but they are specified using relative terms -- em, %, so they scale on different displays which may not quite match my vision but is better for the end user.

Regards,
David

[Anak]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i disagree - with my old sony readers - they would override book css & give a uniform reading experience.. I never needed to know about line-heights CSS or how to tweak it.

Kobo have chosen to let book settings over-ride device seeings - that is a deliberate choice - & personally I call it a bug.
A device that is advertised as " you can adjust..." should do what it says - all the time.

Sony and other ereader brands have features to override css code and when enabled, the reader parses some additional code (on the fly) into the html/xml file before it is displayed on the screen. This is what they also do for other device specific features.
This is a good example of a device feature that is taken care off/dealt with on the user-agent itself, and making it software independent (epub).
This is exactly the opposite what Kobo has implemented with its kepub format. Where, to enable device features, code is parsed into the epub itself (software side) while this should have been done on the hardware side.
This is also why books (kepubs) that are displayed incorrectly (empty lines, wrong text alignment, etc.) can not be fixed by a simple firmware update by tweaking the additional parsed code and fix all incorrect books at once.
Kobos implementation requires that all incorrect books must be regenerated individually to fix these kind of errors. Unfortunately, Kobo doesn't do this. Maybe it does for books published in English but for other languages it doesn't and a incorrect book stays incorrect forever.

[Ken Maltby]

Koreader has a number of ways to address issues related to style sheets and can adjust font display.

Luck;
Ken

[Amalthia]

I looked at the css code in the epub file that crashed on my former Kobo. In the body and paragraph tag the font used em. Like "font-size: 1em"

I don't know why Kobo crashed on that the em I thought was adjustable not fixed?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

I looked at the css code in the epub file that crashed on my former Kobo. In the body and paragraph tag the font used em. Like "font-size: 1em"

I don't know why Kobo crashed on that the em I thought was adjustable not fixed?

Em is relative and adjustable so it looks as if something else may have crashed your Kobo. Is the ebook freely redistributable? If so, you could attach the file to a message here and get some eyes on it. Otherwise, could you PM me.

Regards,
David

[cybmole]

being upable to select teh font FAMILY is a much more common annoyance.

even a generic line like font=family:serif; is enough to "fix" fhe family and disable font selection on device a far as Kobo reader is concerned.

Line spacing controls ARE disabled by relative sizes like 1.2em; AND by non specified unit statement like line-height: 1.2;

so the line spacer controls are useless unless ALL line height CSS is manually removed.

If you look at Kinldes devices, their font / line controls just work.

[Anak]

Originally Posted by cybmole

so the line spacer controls are useless unless ALL line height CSS is manually removed.

Just put your preffered default line height in the body tag.
For the most flexible epub: put all your preferred settings in the body tag and Remove/delete all matching child selectors.
The child selectors should only contain different values.

.indent {
font-size:1em;
line-height:1.2;
margin:0;
text-indent:0;
}
.noindent {
margin-top:1em;
text-indent:0;
font-size:1em;
}
.center {
margin:0;
text-alignment:center;
font-size:1em;
text-indent:0;
line-height:1.2;
}

Rewritten it should something like this:

body {line-height:normal;margin:0;padding:0;text-alignment:justify;widows:1;orphans:0;font-size:100%;text-indent:0;}
p {margin:0;padding:0;} */ this is the only exception */

.indent {
text-indent:1em;
}
.noindent {
margin-top:1em;
}
.center {
text-alignment:center;
}

The body tag here also contains some unnecessary selectors because they are identical to the user-agent default settings. I.e: font-size:100% = font-size:12pt.

[cybmole]

i already know how to do it- but it is tedious to have to do it for every book, when a device override would be simpler.

and if the book is drm protected then device override is the ONLY practical option ( other than hacking it )

PS the line height stripping regex that I use is
FIND
line-height:[^;}\r\n]*;?
REPLACE with nothing