EPUB text not filling screen

[Siavahda]

I've only had my Kobo Clara Colour for a few weeks, so please be gentle, I'm still getting the hang of it.

I have an EPUB that is introducing pagebreaks about halfway or three-quarters of the way down the screen. It's not every page, but it's not random - if I change the font size, the breaks occur on the same sentence/line, even if the actual word the break happens on changes.

But when I break open the EPUB in the Calibre editor, there doesn't seem to be a cause for it. If anything, EVERY paragraph now has page-break-after: avoid in the css. (No idea why someone built it that way, but whatever.)

When I add the book as KEPUB, there are none of these breaks, the text fills the whole screen properly.

This is the first book where I experimented a bit to see if the breaks were always in the same place, and the first time the pagebreaks occurred so high on the screen, but I've noticed while reading other EPUBs that occasionally the text doesn't go down to the bottom of the screen, even when there's not supposed to be a pagebreak. For no apparent reason that I can figure out.

Is this just something I have to live with, ie a fact of life if I use EPUB not KEPUB? Or is there a way to fix this? It's not a huge issue, but it's annoying.

(KEPUB isn't an option because its inability to display em dashes properly causes me unreasonable amounts of distress, so.)

[Sirtel]

It's widows and orphans. They can be different from book to book; kepubs ignore the css rules for them, but epubs respect them. To get rid of them in epubs, you'll need to change them to 1 or just delete them in the book css if they're 2 or more, and add the following in the Kobo configuration file (eReader.conf in .kobo/kobo):

[Reading]
readingAdobeOrphans=1
readingAdobeWidows=1

[Siavahda]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

It's widows and orphans. They can be different from book to book; kepubs ignore the css rules for them, but epubs respect them. To get rid of them in epubs, you'll need to change them to 1 or just delete them in the book css if they're 2 or more, and add the following in the Kobo configuration file (eReader.conf in .kobo/kobo):

[Reading]
readingAdobeOrphans=1
readingAdobeWidows=1

Thank you! I edited the configuration file no problem, but I can't find anything about widows or orphans in the CSS of the ebook. Are they called something else?

Just editing the config file seems to have been enough, though, the book's displaying perfectly now! Thanks so much!

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Siavahda

Thank you! I edited the configuration file no problem, but I can't find anything about widows or orphans in the CSS of the ebook. Are they called something else?

Just editing the config file seems to have been enough, though, the book's displaying perfectly now! Thanks so much!

Glad to hear that. No, they're called exactly that, widows and orphans. Maybe the book itself didn't have them then.

[Siavahda]

So noted. I wondered, because I've never seen them in CSS before.

Unrelated: do you know if AutoUsbGadget is still working when added to the config file? Does it need to be in a particular section of the file? Because I can't seem to get it working.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Siavahda

So noted. I wondered, because I've never seen them in CSS before.

Unrelated: do you know if AutoUsbGadget is still working when added to the config file? Does it need to be in a particular section of the file? Because I can't seem to get it working.

Sorry, I don't use it, so no idea.

[Siavahda]

Never mind. Thank you so much for the widows and orphans fix!

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Siavahda

Thank you! I edited the configuration file no problem, but I can't find anything about widows or orphans in the CSS of the ebook. Are they called something else?

Just editing the config file seems to have been enough, though, the book's displaying perfectly now! Thanks so much!

If the css doesn't specify, then usually a default of 2 is used on the basis that a single line at the bottom or top can be disorientating.

You can't set 0 as that is meaningless.