kobo epub fixer (font size problems)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by corona

I think you have way more experience with this than I do, but my experience so far doesn't support this. In every case where I've gone in and carefully edited the stylesheet, the ePub still looked nasty, so I've gone back and nuked the stylesheet and then it's been okay.

And the reading experience anyhow is often less than perfect. I've got one pdf book, for example, that just comes out unreadable no matter what after conversion and fiddling around.

What I do is take the purchased ePub, strip the DRM and go in and fix the CSS so the ePub looks good. And sometimes I do remove CSS instructions for font sizing. This is not for an issue with changing the font size. It's because most of the time, the publisher uses too small a size. If I was to just delete the CSS, I'd have an eBook I would not want to read.

PDF is not a good format to convert from to anything else. You WILL have errors. And the only way to get rid of the errors is to do an A/B compare. Not worth the time/effort (IMHO).

[ttluisa]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

However well intentioned you may be, thekidintheclock, am I the only one here that finds it disturbing someone is offering code to "fix" something the "thekidintheclock" programmer cannot test?

Are you aware that the 100 "free" ebooks on the Kobo aren't stored there as discrete ePubs at all?

Deleting the stylesheet in an ePub destroys the ePub -- let's not beat around the bush! You end up with one long text file. That is no longer an "e-book", it's an "e-text".

Those of us who have actually purchased a Kobo, let's all have a little patience and thoroughly enjoy reading the material at hand that works while the "men and women behind the curtain" go about fixing this flaw.

I fear that home brew solutions made in the heat of the moment ultimately make things worse for the end user, not better.

I don't see any mention of the 100 free ebooks in the original post and I don't see it disturbing at all. Somebody is just trying to help. Many people may have enough experience with epub to deal with the stylesheets thing either delete it or edit it, but from what I've heard many other people don't even have a clue what was wrong. The little tool that the OP offered does give us a choice to whether delete the stylesheets or edit it. It may be the best to wait for the kobo firmware but as for now this little tool is the best option to allow us to be able to read those fancy formatted books. I may end up reading a long text file(which still has some basic format) but I'm happy reading it without the need of a magnifier. As for myself, I appreciate the OP's hard work.

[JSWolf]

I don't see a problem with removing the size lines from the CSS to get the ePub to be able to be readable. But deleting the CSS is a bad idea. So please, don't remove the CSS. Badger Kobo to get it fixed.

[thekidintheclock]

my apologies guys - i agree that you probably shouldn't go around deleting your "css"es and that kobo will probably fix the bug soon. i was mostly just curious if i could understand the epub files and write something to save people time who are going through all the tedious renaming. this is just a little temporary dealie.

[corona]

Originally Posted by ttluisa

Somebody is just trying to help...

Totally! And as for me, all I care about is readability. If I just get one relatively unformatted page of plain-vanilla text after another, all the better! The documents and books I've been converting to ePub don't have diagrams or anything fancy in them. And as I've said, in my admittedly limited experience, deleting the stylesheet is what gets the job done. Ooh; I hope that's not too assertive or anything. I just think the kid in the clock there did a helpful thing, and if you don't want to delete the stylesheet, you don't have to click in the box.

Oh, and you're right: Kobo headquarters should get this fixed (and presumably will!).

[Thrasher]

Seems like a nice tool. What would be nice is if you could add the option of batch embedding of fonts into epubs so foreign characters display properly.
For example adding this to the stylesheet.css file:

@font-face {
  font-style: italic;
  font-family: 'Liberation', serif, sans-serif;
  font-weight: normal;
  src: url(LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf);
  }
  @font-face {
  font-style: normal;
  font-family: 'Liberation', serif, sans-serif;
  font-weight: normal;
  src: url(LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf);
  }
  @font-face {
  font-style: italic;
  font-family: 'Liberation', serif, sans-serif;
  font-weight: bold;
  src: url(LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf);
  }
  @font-face {
  font-style: normal;
  font-family: 'Liberation', serif, sans-serif;
  font-weight: bold;
  src: url(LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf);
  }

and then copying these fonts into each epub:

LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf
LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf
LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf
LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf

According to this thread

[Stinger]

Originally Posted by corona

Totally! And as for me, all I care about is readability. If I just get one relatively unformatted page of plain-vanilla text after another, all the better! The documents and books I've been converting to ePub don't have diagrams or anything fancy in them. And as I've said, in my admittedly limited experience, deleting the stylesheet is what gets the job done. Ooh; I hope that's not too assertive or anything. I just think the kid in the clock there did a helpful thing, and if you don't want to delete the stylesheet, you don't have to click in the box.

Oh, and you're right: Kobo headquarters should get this fixed (and presumably will!).

+1 to this sentiment.
A lot of the ebooks I've converted for my Kobo have been from nice HTML rips that used standard tags over customizing things heavily in the css. Chapter headings were wrapped in <h3> tags, bolds and italics in their own HTML tags, etc. Just about the only thing I've lost is justification, and indentation in certain cases. And removing the font-size: lines manually fixes those problems if I want to take the time to do that.


Also a suggestion for this tool. Since there is a bug ATM where file names with an apostrophe can trigger the "Content is Locked" ADE message, it might be nice if you added an option to remove them from your output file names. I know its a pretty small thing, I only mention it because it would take all of a couple minutes to implement.

[JCSullivan]

Well, you know what you (know who you are) might be happy as a pig in crap to read your off-the-shelf epubs but I ain't.

The reason I bought the Kobo was to be able to read pdf and no matter what I've done whether using Adobe itself, Calibre or Word I still can't read pdf properly.

Frustration has finally set-in so, I've decided to return TODAY, if I can, and wait for the fix. I've way waited too much time to deal with THEIR mistake.

[Stinger]

I don't know what problem you're referring to JCSullivan, but it seems you're more pissed about the nature of PDF's and not the Kobo itself.

PDF's were designed for publishing/printing purposes, and as such uses absolute positioning based on the page size... which makes in inherently unfriendly to 'reflow' concepts like font resizing. Essentially, PDF's are made to be 1:1 digital copies of print material.

So taking PDF's that are created with a standard page size, and viewing them on a smaller screen like the Kobo's is probably not ever going to be elegant. You're probably always going to be limited to simple zooming and panning.

The only way around this is creating the PDF's so the page size is as small as the Kobo screen. Since most of my master copies of my books are HTML (epub is just HTML/XML wrapped in a zip container), cooking a PDF with an appropriate page size is easy, and reading on the Kobo doesn't require panning around.

Of course, if your master copies are already PDF's, this won't be very helpful to you. Which is exactly the reason I try very hard to avoid PDF's as master copies for ebooks.

[dantaipan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I don't see a problem with removing the size lines from the CSS to get the ePub to be able to be readable. But deleting the CSS is a bad idea. So please, don't remove the CSS. Badger Kobo to get it fixed.

It's not just the font-size property in the css that is creating display issues. I had an epub that had margins set to "0%" in each chapter/html file. Kobo choked on the 0% and added huge margins.

For books, I have been appending the stylesheet file name with ".bak" so that if they do sort the problem out I can revert it back. IMO it looks like the kobo applies it's own css to HTML elements which conflicts with any local css. What it should do is first look to see if there is css local to the epub for each element and if so use that and not try to apply it's own styles.

[Turt99]

Originally Posted by dantaipan

IMO it looks like the kobo applies it's own css to HTML elements which conflicts with any local css. What it should do is first look to see if there is css local to the epub for each element and if so use that and not try to apply it's own styles.

I would agree with this, I've found that it depends on what type of HTML tag you have the font-size set on, so it would make sense that its because the Kobo is applying its own styles for some tags.

[ttluisa]

Originally Posted by JCSullivan

Well, you know what you (know who you are) might be happy as a pig in crap to read your off-the-shelf epubs but I ain't.

Is it just me being sentimental or what because I found your first line pretty offensive.

[artificial]

Thanks for creating this application! It looks much less tedious than renaming/expanding/editing/resaving each epub manually!

[PERTU]

I tried both of your epub fixers but I get this error:



BTW I'm on Windows 7 x64.

[thekidintheclock]

PERTU - Try this one.

http://dl.thekidintheclock.com/u/514...ixer-PERTU.zip