A way to disable Italics in Kobo user interface

[pickyaxe]

One thing I really dislike about the Kobo interface is the italic text everywhere. Talk about anachronistic. Is there any way to get rid of all those italics in the interface? A patch for that would be great.

[davidfor]

The problem with doing that is that italics in the UI means something. Anywhere there are italics in the UI, tapping will do something.

[pickyaxe]

Yep, in terms of GUI coherence a more thorough redesign is needed: some of the clickable text can be made bold for example.

But for someone like me who has used GUIs for over 2 decades, I have no problem figuring out what's clickable and what's not.

Actually, just replacing all the italics with bold can make an interesting experiment - I'm pretty sure it'll be an improvement.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by pickyaxe

Yep, in terms of GUI coherence a more thorough redesign is needed: some of the clickable text can be made bold for example.

But for someone like me who has used GUIs for over 2 decades, I have no problem figuring out what's clickable and what's not.

That's good, but, it isn't that obvious to most people. I have posted the comment about italics in the interface a lot of times.

Actually, just replacing all the italics with bold can make an interesting experiment - I'm pretty sure it'll be an improvement.

Just so long as you keep it away from my devices. I don't think that a lot of bold works that well on e-ink screens.

[Ripplinger]

For myself, I'd find the bold text in place of the italics to be far more offensive, that would be a real eyesore to me. Don't forget it's still mixed in with regular text that won't be bold.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by pickyaxe

One thing I really dislike about the Kobo interface is the italic text everywhere. Talk about anachronistic. Is there any way to get rid of all those italics in the interface? A patch for that would be great.

I made a patch for firmware 3.12.1 to change every instance of "font-style: italic;" to "font-style: normal;", as a way of working out how to change certain parts of the UI, but there were still some italics that didn't change, so it seems that some styles are not set using CSS and those will be much harder to change.

As well as using italics to indicate things that can be tapped, on the frontlit devices book titles are also displayed in italics. That is a common convention when writing book titles.

There is a problem with this though, as the system fonts -- Georgia at least -- seem to lack italic versions of some glyphs used in some languages such as Arabic. So book titles in Arabic and probably other languages will not display correctly when italics are used. I think this is something Kobo need to address, it could be done by substituting from a regular font if an italic glyph is not available.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I made a patch for firmware 3.12.1 to change every instance of "font-style: italic;" to "font-style: normal;", as a way of working out how to change certain parts of the UI, but there were still some italics that didn't change, so it seems that some styles are not set using CSS and those will be much harder to change.

Since you did not mention explicitly which file or files you patched, I can only guess you patched only libnickel.so.1.0.0. There are however css instructions in nickel too, some of them zlib compressed.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by tshering

Since you did not mention explicitly which file or files you patched, I can only guess you patched only libnickel.so.1.0.0. There are however css instructions in nickel too, some of them zlib compressed.

You're right, I didn't think to check for compressed strings.