resolving presentation issues with Kobo Touch (fonts, line height etc)

[digital punk]

Hey just got a new Kobo Touch. No reason other than it was cheap. And my Kindle 4 got trod on (second time I've drunkenly trashed a Kindle).

Very disappointed however with the amount of format/presentation errors I'm seeing on the Kobo. These are epubs from books that (in mobi form) looked fine on the Kindle.

After a quick investigation it seems like Kobo won't override style commands in the same way that other readers apparently do. This means that you: a) may not be able to change the style of font; b) may not be able to change the line spacing; c) may experience large irregular gaps at the bottom of the page. And possibly there are other presentation issues that I haven't come across yet which are similar in origin.

If you're having similar problems you may want to batch convert epubs in calibre to remove the offending commands. What I did was as follows:

Select all the books in Calibre and press Bulk Convert. Inside "Look and Feel" click "Filter Style Information". Type in the following: font-family, line-height, widows, orphans . Click OK! Calibre then removes those commands from the entire set of books you selected.

That's the main thing you need to do. It might be worth setting the line height to 100% and clicking on "remove spacing between paragraphs". Haven't fully tested these options but seems to improve presentation slightly.

Make sure you delete the old epubs from Kobo before sending the new versions.

Hopefully that helps users that are noticing simliar problems!

Interested in what other people have to say. I'm not exactly an expert. If I discover any related issues I'll post em here.

[GeoffR]

There are a couple of proplems you may have with this approach:

1. Filtering out font-family information means that some books which use more than one font will now use the same font everywhere. This can spoil books which have embedded fonts for special symbols that don't exist in the standard fonts.

2. Filtering out line-height information means that titles, chapter headings, etc. that are in a large font may overlap at low line-spacing settings if they run to more than one line, and some special formatting such as drop caps will be messed up.

Best to check whether the book needs fixing first, and only fix the ones that need it.

[digital punk]

Hmm, I would have thought the text size effectively altered the line height automatically?

You are right of course that you would get the best results tweaking each one individually. I was hoping to come up with a general protocol to save time and which won't cause any additional problems.

I can't help thinking that this should be the job of Kobo to set their readers up to automatically anticipate formatting issues. I expect though that if I complain to Kobo they are just going to tell me to buy books directly from their own Kobo store.

[digital punk]

Also regarding a book with multiple fonts - it seems to me that the reader is at best just approximating the fonts anyway, probably wouldn't look the way the publisher intended anyhow, so not really compromising too much by using only one font.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by digital punk

Hmm, I would have thought the text size effectively altered the line height automatically?

You are right of course that you would get the best results tweaking each one individually. I was hoping to come up with a general protocol to save time and which won't cause any additional problems.

What you have is a reasonable first cut for the changes, but as GeoffR said, there are some other things you need to consider. About the only thing you can do is experiment.

I can't help thinking that this should be the job of Kobo to set their readers up to automatically anticipate formatting issues. I expect though that if I complain to Kobo they are just going to tell me to buy books directly from their own Kobo store.

Kobo actually does a good job of rendering the book the way it is intended by the creator. Unfortunately, this means some loss of adjustment by the end user. But, a well coded book will do both, show the styling the designer wants and allow overriding things like font size and spacing. But, automatically anticipating this means that Kobo have to code for any code put into a book. That's just not possible.

Originally Posted by digital punk

Also regarding a book with multiple fonts - it seems to me that the reader is at best just approximating the fonts anyway, probably wouldn't look the way the publisher intended anyhow, so not really compromising too much by using only one font.

Again, Kobo handles fonts well, but with one proviso: the font has to be correctly named. You can sideload fonts or have them embedded in the epub. And the device will use them and, depending on the font, display them fairly well. But, Kobo is strict about the naming standard for the font files and if the don't match what is expected, they will not be used.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by digital punk

Very disappointed however with the amount of format/presentation errors I'm seeing on the Kobo. These are epubs from books that (in mobi form) looked fine on the Kindle.

Kobo made a choice to (mostly) respect publisher formatting -- sadly many of the publishers make very poor choices about their formatting. I tend to prefer Kobo's choice to follow the epub styling. I tried and dumped Coolreader on my Glo because I was never certain that it even read the epub's stylesheet.

Other ereader/software seem to ignore the publisher formatting and go with their own generic formatting. This tends to give a more consistent look but also tends to make any special formatting look like garbage -- a quoted poem or an ordered list as an often horrible examples.

My personal opinion is that arguing about that choice is about as sensible (and useful) as arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's a matter of personal choice or simply what came with your dedicated ereader.

I do edit the majority of the epubs I read using Sigil to clean up what I regard as poor choices on the part of many publishers. Baen (which I get quite a bit of my science fiction fix from) and Harlequin (which my wife gets her romance fix from) seem to have spent the time to get a consistent and decent style for their epub ebooks. Other publishers are definitely in the cold pancakes and no honey category -- as an example, one recent epub I purchased had the title of the books shown on two overlapping lines and this was consistent on all the devices and software I opened it on other than an older version of ADE on a Mac.

Regards,
David

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by digital punk

Hmm, I would have thought the text size effectively altered the line height automatically?

It should, but in practice what happens when there are no line-height properies at all is that as you reduce the line spacing with the adjustment slider, the spacing between lines with a larger font size is reduced proportionately more than those with a small font size. This means that if you get the spacing you want for the main text, larger text will be too close and smaller text too wide.

The ideal way to fix the book is to remove line-height property (or replace it with line-height:inherit) only for the main text, and to leave (or add) the line-height property on titles, headings, and other special formatting such as drop caps, superscripts, etc.


Edit: I should add that there is a patch for the Kobo firmware that will cause it to do the same thing you propose doing with Cailbre, i.e. stripping line-height and font-family properties, but without needing to modify the book. However it suffers the same problems as the Calibre method: there will be some books where it is important to have the line-height and font-family properties left intact.

[digital punk]

oh wait I just came across a whole lot of relevant stuff!!!!

There's a plugin you can get here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=220565 which does at least as good a job as the procedure I figured out last night, and probably is a whole lot more useful besides.

I also had no idea that Kobo uses a proprietary format which is now known as kebup.

Someone should stick this plugin and all the related info at the top of the kobo section of this forum!

[digital punk]

plus thanks for all the replies :-) have you guys used the kepub plugin, is there anything else I should know?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by digital punk

oh wait I just came across a whole lot of relevant stuff!!!!

There's a plugin you can get here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=220565 which does at least as good a job as the procedure I figured out last night, and probably is a whole lot more useful besides.

The only thing it should do for you that affects what you posted is append styles to the stylesheet. The main KoboTouch driver can also do this. Some of the things are happening because of the difference between how epubs and kepubs are handled but the device.

I also had no idea that Kobo uses a proprietary format which is now known as kebup.

Yes, kepub is Kobo's bastardisation of epub. But, they still support epub using a different reader application on the device.

Someone should stick this plugin and all the related info at the top of the kobo section of this forum!

You might want to look at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=217160.