How to convert a book so features work in Kobo Aura

[barryem]

I have the original Kobo Aura and I only read sideloaded books on it. I buy them from Amazon for the most part. I keep running into problems with it's formatting features. On my current book neither the line spacing or the font weight can be controlled. On my previous book, converted with the same settings in Calibre, the line spacing did work. I don't recall if font weight worked. I think it did too but I'm not sure.

I've tried changing a lot of things to make books react to the Kobo's features but I never seem to get anywhere. By the way I've also tried converting to Kepub instead of epub. That didn't help.

Am I just out of luck or is there some setting or combination of settings that will make these features reliable? Or is there something I can do with the book editor that will help? I don't know a lot about HTML or CSS and I don't intend to become expert in these things but I have learned to do a few simple things and I don't mind learning more, if I just knew what I had to learn.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.

Barry

[Question Mark]

When you used Calibre to convert the book to a kepub, did you also use Calibre to send it to your Kobo?

I bought a Japanese book from Kobo, stripped the DRM off it and then sideloaded it onto my Kobo Aura and my KA1 as an epub. Although I could read it, none of the features worked. Especially annoying was that I couldn't get the Japanese dictionary to work with it.

So I used Calibre to convert the DRM free epub back to a kepub, then dragged and dropped it onto my Kobos. Didn't work.

Finally, I used Calibre to send it to my Kobos and everything seems to be working fine.

You might also want to consider using Koreader on your Kobo. I have some Chinese DRM free epubs which I am able to read on both of my Kobos and which I can use a sideloaded Chinese-English dictionary with. However, some other functions won't work such as jumping to a chapter from the table of contents... I haven't yet tried to convert them to kepubs to see if that might resolve the issue because it isn't overly important to me. However, I did try opening them up with Koreader and was able to jump from the TOC to the selected chapter without any difficulty.

The other advantage of Koreader is that it allowed me to install quite a few more dictionaries. I now have 6 Chinese dictionaries to choose from when looking up vocabulary. Consequently, Koreader is now what I use for reading in Chinese.

[GeoffR]

The adjustable font weight only works with built-in fonts, so if the publisher forces the book to use an embedded font then you won't be able to adjust the weight. The publisher can also force the book to use a fixed line spacing which overrides the spacing set by the device.

The easiest way to work around these problems during conversion is to filter out the CSS properties that the publisher uses to force the font family and line spacing. In the Calibre conversion settings Look & feel > Styling > FIlter Style Information, add line-height, font-family, font to the list of styles to completely remove. See attached pic.

Another option is to patch the firmware. There are patches `Force user font-family in ePubs` and `Force user line spacing in ePubs` which essentially to the same as the above for ePubs, and `Force user line spacing in KePubs` for KePubs.

(The above methods are the easiest, not the best. Converting from another format to ePub never gives perfect results, so if you want perfection I believe the only option is to learn CSS/XHTML and edit each converted book manually.)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by barryem

I have the original Kobo Aura and I only read sideloaded books on it. I buy them from Amazon for the most part. I keep running into problems with it's formatting features.

It seems there are three quite different kinds of eBook sold by Amazon. With two kinds the actual eInk Kindle as a destination is greyed out. They only supposed to work with Fire or the Kindle App. I did get one of these and it DOES work in the Kindle App (even under WINE on Linux). I couldn't open it on my actual Kindle. I then used Calibre to convert to ePub and make a mobi. Both would load on eInk Kindle or Kobo H20, but formatting was dreadful. According to Amazon decision made by the Author/Publisher, who wanted a PARTICULAR layout. It's not even the Kids/Comic style eBook (also mis-sold as Kindle). The only way to fix it was export as DocX, import into LibreOffice (or Word), reformat, save and import to Calibre for conversion.

Needless to say the original doesn't format properly on a small phone. ALL my other Amazon, Gutenberg and Smashwords books do.
Download a bunch of free Gutenberg mobi files, or free Amazon books (supported by eInk model Kindles) and practice converting to ePub. I find the same settings work for everything including my own libreoffice and MSWord files.

[barryem]

My Kobo has the most recent update so I can't send books to it via Calibre so I wasn't able to test Question Mark's suggestion.

GoeffR I did try your suggestion and it did work. I can now control line spacing and font weight on a book I wasn't previously able to control. The problem is that the minimum line spacing this way is only slightly closer than what I had before. On other books when line spacing worked I was able to get lines closer than this.

I realize I'm nit-picking. All of these ways I've tried are okay. It's not exactly a problem that has to be solved. I'm just trying to get things a little more to my liking.

FrustratedReader, I use epub files on the Kobo, not Mobi. I've found that mobi files are considerably more troublesome on the Kobo and I have the epub file for use on Moon+ on my phone anyway. Also epub lets me modify the TOC, which I often do when it's incomplete.

This particular book isn't from Amazon. They don't have it or I'd have bought it from them and read it on my Kindle.

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and especially to GeoffR, whose suggestion I used.

Barry

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by barryem

My Kobo has the most recent update so I can't send books to it via Calibre so I wasn't able to test Question Mark's suggestion.

Calibre v2.85 should have support for the 4.4.x firmware. If you don't want to update, use the "Attempt to support newer firmware versions" in the driver configuration. This is safe for any reasonable recent version of calibre.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by barryem

GoeffR I did try your suggestion and it did work. I can now control line spacing and font weight on a book I wasn't previously able to control. The problem is that the minimum line spacing this way is only slightly closer than what I had before. On other books when line spacing worked I was able to get lines closer than this.

Each font has a certain amount of spacing built in to the font itself, so some will have narrower spacing than others even when the device's adjustment slider is at the same position.

There are a number of ways to reduce the minimum line spacing: choose a different font with narrower built-in spacing; edit the font to change its built-in spacing; patch the firmware to allow narrower settings on the adjustment slider; edit the book's stylesheet to set a fixed spacing.

If you have a favourite sideloaded font that you use for reading then the best way is probably to edit that font to reduce its spacing. Fontforge is a free program that can do do that (Font Info > OS/2 > Metrics), although it can take some time to learn how it works. If the font in question is freely available then someone on this forum might be able to create a modified version for you. There are also websites that will modify a font that you upload to them.

Whichever method you use, the KePub reader has a limit on how narrow you can make the line spacing, too narrow and it will start to have problems where part of the text gets clipped at the top or bottom of the page. But the ePub reader works fine with any line spacing.

[JSWolf]

ChareInk that I've edited has a narrower line spacing. It's done that way because it's what I prefer. But, because of the slider, if you don't prefer a narrower space, you can adjust that to your liking.

[barryem]

Thanks for the tips. For me this is a pretty minor problem. If I can adjust settings in Calibre, which I already use, to make this work I'll be glad. I'm not sure it's worth adding extra steps to the conversion process.

I'm reading the book in question as it is and I'd like the lines to be a bit closer together but I'm still enjoying the book.

I'm not trying to get lines very very close together. The suggestions you (GoeffR) made did help and the spacing was okay. It was just that it was the very minimum spacing and I'd like to have tried a little closer lines. I'm not sure I'd have stayed with the even closer lines but it would have been worth trying. Really though my question was more about getting a bit more control.

I've decided to just leave it as it is and read it this way for now. I'll do a bit more experimenting and see what happens.

Calibre is a pretty powerful program and I keep learning more and more about it. I'm pretty fussy about TOC's in a book and I've learned to, usually, get them the way I like them. I'm less fussy about spacing and formatting of the page.

Barry