Aura Calibre and CSS

[Farid]

Hi all,

I've had my Aura for a while now (about 2 years) and usually buy my ebooks from amazon, which I then pass through calibre to get them transformed as epub and thus readable by my Aura.

Yet, most of the time (to not say pretty much always) I need to edit the stylesheet.css file in the produced epub, and add the style

line-height: 1.2;

in the .calibre rule to avoid huge blank space between lines.

I assume I missed a silly configuration setup in calibre to do that automatically, without having to edit the pub itself ?

Is anyone aware of such configuration parameter ?

Thanks in advance.

[dickloraine]

Since you are converting, there is a check-box to remove the line-height css. That way you can adjust the line height with the setting on the aura.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Farid

I've had my Aura for a while now (about 2 years) and usually buy my ebooks from amazon, which I then pass through calibre to get them transformed as epub and thus readable by my Aura.

Yet, most of the time (to not say pretty much always) I need to edit the stylesheet.css file in the produced epub, and add the style

line-height: 1.2;

in the .calibre rule to avoid huge blank space between lines.

If adding line-height:1.2; to .calibre reduces the line spacing, then either the book had a much larger line-height set in .calibre already, or you have the line-spacing adjustment slider on your Aura set to a large spacing.

In either case I think you would be better to remove any existing line-height setting from .calibre and use your line spacing adjutment slider to set the line spacing from the device, rather than setting a fixed line spacing in the book.

(Having line-height set in .calibre will prevent the line spacing adjustment slider from working in the ePub reader, but should have no effect at all in the KePub reader.)

Edit: As for Calibre convesion settings, make sure the minimum line height is not set larger than 120%, and I would disable the font size rescaling which can cause unexpected effects in combination with line-height set in body if the line-height has em units. But I haven't found any setting in Calibre that gives perfect results, it is always necessary to fix up the various problems caused by conversion manually, even when converting ePub to ePub.

[Farid]

Thanks a lot !

Checking the checkbox "Disable font size rescaling" in the convert popup did the trick.

All the other settings there were already at their default values, and the line spacing in my kobo was already at the minimum.

No more css editing for me (well at least not systematically)

Thanks again !

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Farid

Checking the checkbox "Disable font size rescaling" in the convert popup did the trick.

All the other settings there were already at their default values, and the line spacing in my kobo was already at the minimum.

One thing I forgot is that there was a problem with the way the line spacing was set for ePubs that was fixed in firmware 3.16.0, so if you are using firmware older than 3.16.0 then the problems you see might be related to that.

The problem was that the default line-height set by the line spacing adjustment slider was set in em units, which meant that even if you removed all line-height styles from the stylesheet, font-size rescaling could still affect the line spacing. In firmware 3.16.0 the way the line spacing is set was changed to use a unitess line height, and so the font size rescaling should no longer cause a problem unless the publisher has tried to force a fixed line-height with em/% units.

There is a little more information in this post including some screenshots that show some of the effects of the problem.

[Farid]

I've had that issue since I bought my aura about 2 years ago which had at that time the firmware 2.8.x i beleive.

I've always updated my firmware as soon as it was available via the kobo application (currently using version 3.19.5761).

I guess the issue you are referring to in the pre 3.16.0 versions didn't help, but using the checkbox you've indicated in your previous message did definitively resolve the issue when converting from amazon azw3 format to epubs.

Thanks again.