[Device Plugin] Kobo Touch Extended Driver

[jgoguen]

This looks different from the example in the book I looked at. This seems to be making paragraph lines (or a fake list) indented, which I may not like visually but off the top of my head I expect what you show in the image could be done without god-awful markup and questionable CSS choices. I'd prefer to see it done with <ol> or <ul> and styling the <li>, but there are other clean ways to do it. Just my own personal preference not liking how this looks rather than a final product that makes me question how much the publisher actually knows about HTML or CSS.

The book example I was commenting on is a case where a <dl> is both a clean and natural choice. The <dt> in that case would be the name of the speaker and the <dd> would be the text. Style it to float the <dt> to the left at some low percentage width and <dd> to the right at remaining width and you've got the same effect with much cleaner markup and CSS.

[Quoth]

using <p> with suitable classes is more reliable and can exactly duplicate ol ul li etc, which are needed for server side auto-generated content from a database, or a convenience. They are not needed at all in ebooks.

No need for dd or dt and float is best avoided in ebooks.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

using <p> with suitable classes is more reliable and can exactly duplicate ol ul li etc, which are needed for server side auto-generated content from a database, or a convenience. They are not needed at all in ebooks.

No need for dd or dt and float is best avoided in ebooks.

I prefer a flat <p> for most paragraphs.

[mgrimace]

Originally Posted by jgoguen

I suspect what's happening here is a matter of the book cover versus the metadata cover. In calibre's file system, alongside the book you'll see "cover.jpg". This is what gets added to the book file unless you specify different options in conversion. If you unpack the KePub and inspect the converted book cover and cover.jpg, I bet they're different.

Beyond here I'm a little more fuzzy on details. As I understand it, metadata sent over to Kobo by calibre-web, as a consequence of how Kobo syncs, is the metadata shown in the UI, not what's in the book itself. The cover is included in "metadata" and is fetched by Kobo separately from the book, and you get whatever is cover.jpg showing as the book cover on the device. If you open your book and go back to the cover page, it's probably the image you're expecting to see.

So, my best educated guess would be to change the cover itself in calibre to be the dimensions you want rather than do it in book conversion options. How exactly, I'm not sure, I don't have a calibre install accessible right now and I've never needed to do it.

Thanks so much for that thoughtful explanation, it makes sense, I think. I'm murky when it gets to the overlap of covers and metadata as well.

I'll try out changing the 'physical' dimensions of cover.jpg - I was kind of hoping to avoid it, and just 'spanning' them if possible, but proper dimensions for my reader would be a tidier solution to just have consistent covers overall. I know there's plugins that can do this as well.

Thanks so much!