Aura HD Adjusting font color

[joanmed]

I've looked at the Wiki and forum but haven't found an answer to this; hope I didn't miss something.

I just got my Kobo over the weekend and finally got everything set up with not a lot of help from customer support. I'd love to read my first book but the font is gray and difficult to see. I've tried changing the font and font weight, which didn't help. I looked in the guide. I still don't see anything about getting the font color to black and am hoping to find the answer here as I never got a response from my customer support email and am not ready to go through another lengthy session with them on the phone.

Thank you!

[GeoffR]

Is the book one you bought and downloaded direct from Kobo, or one you sideloaded? Have you tried a few different books?

The font colour defaults to black, but can also be set in the book itself. If the book has changed it to another colour then you would need to edit the book to fix it.

Some publishers change the font colour for headings, but I have never seen a book where the main text was set to anything except black, I would really count that as a publishing error.

[PeterT]

I've seen at times books where the body text comes across on the Kobo as a lighter grey shade, as opposed to black.

Next time I see one I will have to look at the CSS being used to see what is being used.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Is the book one you bought and downloaded direct from Kobo, or one you sideloaded? Have you tried a few different books?

The font colour defaults to black, but can also be set in the book itself. If the book has changed it to another colour then you would need to edit the book to fix it.

Some publishers change the font colour for headings, but I have never seen a book where the main text was set to anything except black, I would really count that as a publishing error.

I've had one book where the css set the font colour to a dark grey and the background to a beige which didn't look bad on a tablet but on my Aura HD, it looked like grey on grey crap. When I asked why this was done, the response was that, for epubs, their testing was done on an iPad and they had not tested the epub on any other devices.

[robko]

The answers in this thread raise all kinds of interesting thoughts with epubs that I hadn't ever thought of. Considering that the screenshots from the screenshot hack are in full colour I guess it makes sense that font/page colour could be specified and would be rendered as such except that it would display as grey scales. I've never really delved into CSS or any of that so I guess since I just assumed it was black and white by default and never thought of options. Learning lots!

[joanmed]

Downloaded direct from Kobo. How would I edit the book, though I've also never seen a book that had the text in anything other than black. I've had a Kindle for years and loads of books. First gray I've had.

Originally Posted by GeoffR

Is the book one you bought and downloaded direct from Kobo, or one you sideloaded? Have you tried a few different books?

The font colour defaults to black, but can also be set in the book itself. If the book has changed it to another colour then you would need to edit the book to fix it.

Some publishers change the font colour for headings, but I have never seen a book where the main text was set to anything except black, I would really count that as a publishing error.

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by joanmed

Downloaded direct from Kobo. How would I edit the book,.....

with difficulty!

I'd get a refund, or a swap for the plain epub version if they have one

kepubs can be hacked but you can't get help with that on this forum.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by joanmed

Downloaded direct from Kobo. How would I edit the book, though I've also never seen a book that had the text in anything other than black. I've had a Kindle for years and loads of books. First gray I've had.

If you've never edited an ebook before then you might not want to go through the learning curve just for this one book, but if you do then the basic procedure is:
- Go to your library on the Kobo website and download the epub version of the book.
- (If the book has DRM then you will need to download it with ADE and remove the DRM.)
- Unpack the book (in Calibre for example) and edit the CSS stylesheet (file suffix .css).
- Look for keywords like color: green; and background-color: yellow; and delete.
- Sideload the corrected book to you device.

[cybmole]

its likely that the publisher has set a "grey" looking font, so you'd also be looking for font-family: "fontname"; type entries. Fonts such as garamond pro can look awful in e-ink.

but with the kepub is there not an option to change font using the aura-HD reader controls, & change it to something better looking ? I thought that one of the advantages of the Kepub format was that you could (most of the time anyway) override the publishers' font choice.

PS you can post the book TITLE here - someone may have an unlocked copy and thus be able to tell us what font(s) are in use

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by cybmole

PS you can post the book TITLE here - someone may have an unlocked copy and thus be able to tell us what font(s) are in use

Or obtain a preview of it and take a look at that

[PeterT]

Have you tried using Kobo Desktop to look at the book?

I download a preview of "The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan" via Kobo Desktop and WiFi to my Glo and saw that the Table Of Contents was in a lighter shade of gray.

Viewing the book via Kobo Desktop, the TOC is BLUE.

Looking at the kepub file (previews are not encrypyed, and can be copied to have either a .epub or .zip extension) the TOC is styled with an inline style of

<style xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" type="text/css" id="kobostylehacks">
div#book-inner p, div#book-inner div { 
    font-size: 1.0em; }
 a { 
    color: black; } 
a:link, a:visited, a:hover, a:active { 
    color: blue; } 
div#book-inner * { 
    margin-top: 0 !important; 
    margin-bottom: 0 !important;}
</style>

So I think it's safe to say it's related to the colour applied to the text via CSS.

[joanmed]

Book is The Female Brain by Brizendine.
Got a reply from Kobo support today:

Thank you for contacting Kobo Customer Care. We are more than happy to assist you today.

Look out for the capitol A and the small a when you have your eReader open and change the font. There is nothing else that can be done.

When I preview the Kindle edition on Amazon, it's clearly black print. I may see if a free book has the right font color. If not, it will be returned. I'm so frustrated as the rest of my book group is waiting to hear my experience. We all want to support our local book stores.

I appreciate all the replies, even the ones I don't understand

[PeterT]

As I said try using Kobo Desktop and looking at the book there.

[PeterT]

In the preview, I see the TOC in a blueish colour, and the rest of the text in black.

On the Kobo Reader the blueish will come across as being a lighter grey.

[joanmed]

Haven't downloaded the Kobo desktop as it requires iOS 8, which I've been hesitant to upgrade to.

The TOC is a much lighter gray. The text is a darker gray. I'm wondering how much the brightness affects the saturation of the color. When I set the brightness at 1% it appears darker but then it's not quite readable. I'll try playing with the brightness and see if that helps.