Aura H2O Line height setting is ignored

[kAlvaro]

I mostly use my H2O reader to read regular epub files I purchase in non-Kobo shops. Line height is too large for my liking: it appears to be around 1.3 or 1.4 but I'd prefer something close to 1 as in most paperback books. For whatever the reason, I can change all font settings except line height. No matter what value I set, all my books will look the same.

There're endless Google results that suggest you need to edit every book you buy with Calibre. I've just learnt here that there're unofficial firmwares and alternative reading software.

What'd be your recommendation to just fix the line-height issue?

[jackie_w]

The Kobo Patcher has many patches you can apply. Better selection of line-heights is just one of them. Each patch can be switched on/off.

[frostschutz]

What does the CSS of the book look like?

Unfortunately that gets in the way a lot. I wish the reader was king and your settings would prevail but most of the time it's the books CSS that wins in the end.

HTML/CSS is really not the best choice for ebooks.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by kAlvaro

I mostly use my H2O reader to read regular epub files I purchase in non-Kobo shops. Line height is too large for my liking: it appears to be around 1.3 or 1.4 but I'd prefer something close to 1 as in most paperback books. For whatever the reason, I can change all font settings except line height. No matter what value I set, all my books will look the same.

There're endless Google results that suggest you need to edit every book you buy with Calibre. I've just learnt here that there're unofficial firmwares and alternative reading software.

What'd be your recommendation to just fix the line-height issue?

There are two separate issues: the minimum size of the line spacing, and whether it can be adjusted using the slider on the device.

It would be best if you could try a book where the line spacing is adjustable to see if the minimum slider setting is small enough for you when used with your preferred fonts. If the minimum settting is still too large, then your only option to make it smaller and retain the adjustability using the Kobo ePub or KePub readers would be to patch the firmware, and that might simplify your decisions later.

On the other hand, if the smallest line spacing setting in the stock firmware is acceptable, then you have the option of fixing the non-adjustablility problem just by editing the book's stylesheet (either manually or automatically during conversion by tweaking the settings in Calibre) without the need to patch. There is a new feature in recent Calibre versions that looks like it could allow a way of making the stylesheet changes needed to fix this problem automatically without many of the bad side-effects that result from simply stripping all line-height styles in the book.

If you haven't yet come across a book where the line spacing is adjustable, this one from the Baen free lbrary should work as an example. Also this post will give you an idea of what can be done to customise the range of line spacing settings by patching.

[Edit: What I use personally is a combination: patch to allow narrower line spacing; and editing the book's stylesheet to allow the main body text to be adjustable, while retaining a fixed line-height for special cases (such as line-height:0 for raise-caps, subscripts, etc.) I find that there are usually many things that need fixing in a book, from OCR errors to poor-quality images to formatting, the line-height issue is just one of many.]

[kAlvaro]

Originally Posted by frostschutz

What does the CSS of the book look like?

It isn't a specific book, it's my entire collection—which is not large so far but includes titles from some well-known Spanish publishers like B de Books, Roca or Sportula.

Originally Posted by frostschutz

HTML/CSS is really not the best choice for ebooks.

I happen to be a web developer and I admit that CSS typographic controls are not as fine-grained as those you find in desktop publishing software but line-heigh has existed for several years and works fine in web pages. I wouldn't be surprised if Kobo devs were just using it wrong. What's really good in CSS is the letter C, which stands for "cascading" and means you can easily override styles.

[kAlvaro]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

The Kobo Patcher has many patches you can apply. Better selection of line-heights is just one of them. Each patch can be switched on/off.

Thank you, I'll try that first.

[frostschutz]

Originally Posted by kAlvaro

I happen to be a web developer and I admit that CSS typographic controls are not as fine-grained as those you find in desktop publishing software but

That's not what I meant.

With Ebooks you have a conflict of interest: There is the CSS that says the book should look so-and-so; but whoever reads the ebook has its own personal preferences so the reader offers some settings to make it look so-and-so.

Which setting prevails? Unfortunately most of the time it's the CSS and the readers preference is ignored.

You almost don't have this problem with webpages, people just accept a webpage the way it was intended to be by the web designer, although browsers do have an option to mix custom CSS in (or there are even addons for monkeypatching), most people don't use this [and if they do it breaks a lot of sites, even setting a minimum font size in firefox can ruin the design of some pages].

With ebooks you get crazy font sizes, custom paragraph indentation line spacing etc. etc. etc. and that's fine, readers should be allowed to do all of this stuff - but the reality is, ebooks come with a ton of unnecessary embedded CSS bloat rendering most of those settings ineffective.

An ebook is not a webpage. Webpages need lots and lots of CSS to make them look good. Ebooks look better [and give readers more freedom] the less CSS they have.