Aura HD KA2: references next to unuseable

[DrChiper]

Moderator: Please add "Aura 2 ed" in the prefix list as it is missing to be selected.

I use the KA2 just as a vehicle for "light" reading. My current ebook happened to have references in it; somehow I cannot use those references as the reader does not seem to pick them up (the refs work in other ereaders). All I get are the general Kobo menu's (which I do not want) or Kobo marks the reference as if I want to make a book marking (which I do not want to do either). Sometimes, in about 1 out of 20 tries, the reference *is* selected so it is jumped to the corrct reference location, but it is very unreliable.
Is there some known way to make Kobo more aware that I just want to select a reference? I tried applying long and short selections but none seems to work in a consistent repeatable manner.

[davidfor]

From the description, you are sideloading epub and the footnotes are "cute" little superscript numbers you can barely see, let alone tap.

If I'm correct, the problem is that the epub renderer is a bit literal in the size of the tap area for the link. If the link is a single character, then the tap area is the area occupied by the single character. If you increase the font size, you will find you can tap the link a lot easier.

The better solution is to convert the book to a kepub. For books with lots of footnotes, kepubs have two big advantages. Firstly, the tap area for the link is much bigger. It is normally big enough that you won't have a problem tapping a small superscript number as a link. The other advantage is that a popup is used to display the note. Or at least the start of the note. If the note is to large to be displayed, you can tap a button on the popup to go to the full note.

The best way to get the book onto the device as a kepub is using calibre and either the KoboTouchExtended driver or the Kepub Output plugin. The former will modify the book during the send to device. With the latter, you convert the book to kepub and then send this.

If you are not a calibre user, there is a tool discussed here recently to convert an epub to kepub and you manually sideload this to the device.

[DrChiper]

Originally Posted by davidfor

From the description, you are sideloading epub and the footnotes are "cute" little superscript numbers you can barely see, let alone tap.

Your assumption is correct I side-load with calibre and have never ever used the kepub format.

Originally Posted by davidfor

If I'm correct, the problem is that the epub renderer is a bit literal in the size of the tap area for the link. If the link is a single character, then the tap area is the area occupied by the single character. If you increase the font size, you will find you can tap the link a lot easier.

Possibly, I like to keep as much text on a page as possible, which worked great with my trusted Sony T-series (with ereaders on phone and tablets), even on using references. But, the Kobo differs in that respect I now noticed.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The better solution is to convert the book to a kepub. For books with lots of footnotes, kepubs have two big advantages. Firstly, the tap area for the link is much bigger. It is normally big enough that you won't have a problem tapping a small superscript number as a link.

Nice to know.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The other advantage is that a popup is used to display the note. Or at least the start of the note. If the note is to large to be displayed, you can tap a button on the popup to go to the full note.

That is an interesting feature I was not aware of.

Originally Posted by davidfor

The best way to get the book onto the device as a kepub is using calibre and either the KoboTouchExtended driver or the Kepub Output plugin. The former will modify the book during the send to device. With the latter, you convert the book to kepub and then send this.

Good advice. I will experiment with the suggested apps to see if the extra effort using kepub is justified for an enhanced reader experience. Appreciate the pointers

[DrChiper]

I installed the plugin KoboTouchExtended, disabled the plugin KoboTouch I had already installed and uploaded the e-book. Indeed, the ref is now much better selectable (the pop-up is a nice feature), but ...


The overall margin is increased, even when I specifically set the kobo margin (in reading settings) to 0. This causes the chopping of of 1 rightmost character on every line. There seems to be no other setting on the kobo itself of with the plugin to resolve this. Any ideas?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DrChiper

I installed the plugin KoboTouchExtended, disabled the plugin KoboTouch I had already installed and uploaded the e-book. Indeed, the ref is now much better selectable (the pop-up is a nice feature), but ...


The overall margin is increased, even when I specifically set the kobo margin (in reading settings) to 0. This causes the chopping of of 1 rightmost character on every line. There seems to be no other setting on the kobo itself of with the plugin to resolve this. Any ideas?

There are patches to fix some of the issues with kepub. Check out the patches.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by DrChiper

I installed the plugin KoboTouchExtended, disabled the plugin KoboTouch I had already installed and uploaded the e-book. Indeed, the ref is now much better selectable (the pop-up is a nice feature), but ...


The overall margin is increased, even when I specifically set the kobo margin (in reading settings) to 0. This causes the chopping of of 1 rightmost character on every line. There seems to be no other setting on the kobo itself of with the plugin to resolve this. Any ideas?

Yes, the advantages of the kepub format are offset by disadvantages like this. Though that one also sounds like are using the fullscreen mode. If that is so, then there is a patch to fix it.

[rashkae]

I have a long winded howto here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...&postcount=336

That will show you how to set up a working Kepub with full screen, without patching the firmware. Frankly, firmware patching is probably 'better', but has to be done at every firmware update. The configuration posted here (so far) keeps on working through the updates.

[DrChiper]

Originally Posted by rashkae

I have a long winded howto here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...&postcount=336

Thanks for your pointer. Interesting to know that actually 2 readers are involved. I have some remarks though.

To get it to work for me I needed to make the plugin settings of KoboTouchExtended to match those of the KoboTouch plugin.
The setting of "Modify CSS" actually did the trick. KoboTouchExtended more or less did already add an additional CSS in the resulting kepub file. That makes your extra kobo_extra.css file in the kobo root directory superfluous. I checked that and even completely removed it without any problems.

Further, I did already set

[FeatureSettings]
FullScreenReading=true

which made automagically the setting also appear in

[Reading]
fullScreenReading=true

(Note the lowercase "f" in the name.)

The only disadvantage after the conversion is an extra rim of about 2% all around the text, but seeing the more responsiveness and additional features (image zooming) I just can live with that . And as the epub are converted on the fly when sending them to the kobo reader, I do not have to keep 2 sets of files in the calibre database, which is great.

I'm a happy man

[rashkae]

As far as I know, adding the 'padding' is not done by the Extended driver without an extra.css file. Without that setting, books displayed in full screen will have a few pixels cut off on the right hand side for some letters, (in particular, italicized f is very noticeable.) It's not by any means critical, but once you notice it, it will be like a sore tooth.

[DrChiper]

You could be right. I fiddled somewhat with several files and it still worked, but ... after some time I did a shutdown/restart of the reader and the cut-off appeared again. To be on the safe side I decided to replace the CSS file again which did not help. Only after doing a reader shutdown/restart again, all was working again.

I figure, as I did completely removed the original CSS, that the reader somehow "remembers" the CSS settings (perhaps after sending new e-books to the reader), only to try to re-read it after a shutdown/restart and/or when new e-books are send to it. In those cases it could not find the setting anymore (CSS was deleted), hence resulting in cut-off again of characters.

Well, all works now again, so we can conclude I was perhaps too hasty by removing the CSS

[rashkae]

to be clear, the css file has no effect on the Kobo whatsoever. The contents of that file should be injected into the kepub itself when Calibre 'sends' it to the device. Whether or not it fixes anything depends on the file being in place, and the "Modify CSS" option being enable when the books are sent. Books have to be re-sent if either are changed.

[DrChiper]

Ok. So I summarize:

1. When kobo_extra.css is not present, plugin KoboTouchExtended produces a stylehacks.css file in the resulting kepub containing just:
   

   div#book-inner {
       margin-top: 0;
       margin-bottom: 0
       }

2. When kobo_extra.css is present, plugin KoboTouchExtended produces a stylehacks.css file in the resulting kepub containing:
   

   div#book-inner {
       margin-top: 0;
       margin-bottom: 0
       }
   body {
       margin: 0 !important;
       padding: 0 !important
       }
   body > div {
       padding-left: 0.2em !important;
       padding-right: 0.2em !important
       }

3. When I removed kobo_extra.css, the already created kepub remains with the correct settings and should normally display just fine as before. Perhaps I did recreated the kepub after the removal of kobo_extra.css.

My questions:

1. Where can the description for plugin KoboTouchExtended be found stating that this is the manner to use the plugin?
2. Are other settings possible for plugin KoboTouchExtended?

[DrChiper]

Answering my own questions:

1. The search option was my friend as it is not on the first page of the plugin forum (where it is expected), but appears to pop-up later on in the forum [2013] and is precisely introduced to solve the cut-off problem among others.
2. Yes, but it is not encouraged.

Well, for the moment it just kind of works: and that's what counts