Miscellaneous display and editing matters

[Sirtel]

I use custom screensavers, not book covers, and they've never failed to display correctly.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by foosion

Another oddity: Occasionally when my Kobos go to sleep book covers will display as text (title and kobo epub) with a surrounding box rather than the expected graphic. This will be after displaying normally for days and without any changes to the device. I use kobo utilities to restore the cover.

Anyone else? Any idea how to prevent this?

I read mostly ePub and have no problem with the covers when the Kobo goes to sleep.

I've never heard of that issue, but then maybe it's related to 4.38.23038 which is fairly new.

[foosion]

It happens on both Libra 2 (4.38.23038) and Clara BW (4.39.23027).

I do seem to have a knack for finding strange behavior. It seems there would be less if I stuck to epub, but I like some kepub features.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by foosion

It happens on both Libra 2 (4.38.23038) and Clara BW (4.39.23027).

I do seem to have a knack for finding strange behavior. It seems there would be less if I stuck to epub, but I like some kepub features.

Maybe you just notice all kinds of details most people don't. And it depends partly on the books you read.

I also have only kepubs on my Sage, but I probably don't notice every tiny detail. I do edit my books before reading them (for example, I set the justification OFF on my Kobos, because I specify the alignment in the css). I also read mostly lowbrow genre fiction, with no fancy formatting - very few footnotes, images, links, tables and so on. Mostly just plain text

[foosion]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Maybe you just notice all kinds of details most people don't. And it depends partly on the books you read.

I also have only kepubs on my Sage, but I probably don't notice every tiny detail. I do edit my books before reading them (for example, I set the justification OFF on my Kobos, because I specify the alignment in the css). I also read mostly lowbrow genre fiction, with no fancy formatting - very few footnotes, images, links, tables and so on. Mostly just plain text

I do tend to obsess over details.

Most of what I read is fiction (as you write, mostly just plain text), but a fair percentage is history and other non-fiction, which tends to have more footnotes, images, etc.

I'm moving to turning justification off and fixing the css.

[foosion]

In case anyone cares, I applied the unforce patch to both of my devices and, when I want to deal with links, I add this to the css:

a {
  text-decoration: none;
  color: #005ECF; 
}

The text decoration line removes the underline and the color is lighter than black. I tried using blue as a color, but it's too dark to easily distinguish links from text on my devices. I'm open to suggestion for a color that's a bit lighter.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foosion

Another oddity: Occasionally when my Kobos go to sleep book covers will display as text (title and kobo epub) with a surrounding box rather than the expected graphic. This will be after displaying normally for days and without any changes to the device. I use kobo utilities to restore the cover.

Anyone else? Any idea how to prevent this?

Kepub is a bit fussy about how book covers are shown. Having the cover xhtml as the first in the text files list and the cover image given properties="cover-image" seems to work for me.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Kepub is a bit fussy about how book covers are shown. Having the cover xhtml as the first in the text files list and the cover image given properties="cover-image" seems to work for me.

What puzzles me is why it would work for days, then suddenly stop working.

The latest problem covers:

<div class="cover" id="cover">
<a href="9780063235915_Contents.xhtml#rcover">
<img alt="image" src="../images/9780063235915_Cover.jpg"/>
</a></div>

<p id="ji1838" style="text-align:center;">
<img alt="image" epub:type="cover" role="doc-cover" src="images/9780306830532.jpg" style="height: 100%;"/>
</p>

This is after it was working, then stopped, then started working again after uploading the cover with KoboUtilities.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foosion

What puzzles me is why it would work for days, then suddenly stop working.

The latest problem covers:

<div class="cover" id="cover">
<a href="9780063235915_Contents.xhtml#rcover">
<img alt="image" src="../images/9780063235915_Cover.jpg"/>
</a></div>

<p id="ji1838" style="text-align:center;">
<img alt="image" epub:type="cover" role="doc-cover" src="images/9780306830532.jpg" style="height: 100%;"/>
</p>

This is after it was working, then stopped, then started working again after uploading the cover with KoboUtilities.

KoboUtilities will upload the cover image and flag it in the database bypassing reading the information from the ePub file. What I was looking for was in the content.opf (actually filename.opf but content is popular):

<item id="cover" href="Images/cover.jpeg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>

See the image for the text file bits.

The code I use for displaying the cover image is an SVG wrapper with ePub2 and ePub3 compatibility courtesy of RbJrg (see this message for the code.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by DNSB

What I was looking for was in the content.opf (actually filename.opf but content is popular):

<item id="cover" href="Images/cover.jpeg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>

See the image for the text file bits.

Pretty much the same.

<item href="images/9780063235915_Cover.jpg" id="cover-image" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>

I suppose I should see what's in the opf file after a problem but before fixing it.

[Aleron Ives]

I encountered something strange in KEPUB yesterday. The book CSS contains this (among a few other things):

h1 {
  text-align: center;
  font-size:1.5em;
  margin:1.5em 0em 1.5em 0em;
  font-weight: bold;
}
span.smallcaps {
	text-transform:uppercase;
	font-size:80%;
}
p.left {
  text-indent: 0em;
  margin-top:0em;
  margin-bottom:0em;
  text-align:justify;
}
p.follow {
  text-indent: 1.5em;
  margin-top:0em;
  margin-bottom:0em;
  text-align:justify;
}

The book opens with an h1 header, then p.left with span.smallcaps, then p.follow for subsequent paragraphs. When I open the XHTML file in my browser, everything looks normal, but on my Kobo, the body text is smaller than it should be.

Is it the case that WebKit does not reset font sizes when moving from one CSS class to another, and it's necessary to specify font-size:1em/100%/medium in order to reset the font to the default size after any class that might change it? The only explanation I can think of is that the smallcaps 80% size is being misapplied to p.left and p.follow, since they don't specify a font-size of their own.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by foosion

Another oddity: Occasionally when my Kobos go to sleep book covers will display as text (title and kobo epub) with a surrounding box rather than the expected graphic. This will be after displaying normally for days and without any changes to the device. I use kobo utilities to restore the cover.

Anyone else? Any idea how to prevent this?

Here's a reddit post with a number of people with a similar issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/kobo/commen...s_infuriating/

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

KoboUtilities will upload the cover image and flag it in the database bypassing reading the information from the ePub file. What I was looking for was in the content.opf (actually filename.opf but content is popular):

<item id="cover" href="Images/cover.jpeg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>

See the image for the text file bits.

The code I use for displaying the cover image is an SVG wrapper with ePub2 and ePub3 compatibility courtesy of RbJrg (see this message for the code.

RbJrg's code is not ePub2 compatible. You have to change height: 99vh; to height: 99%; to be ePub2 compatible.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

RbJrg's code is not ePub2 compatible. You have to change height: 99vh; to height: 99%; to be ePub2 compatible.

Oddly enough, it is compatible. The 99vh is not compatible with ePub2 but if you look at the posts about RbnJrg's code please note the comments about which parts are ePub2 and which are ePub3 (for convenience, I bolded them):

.cover {
  margin: 0;
  height: 99vh; /* This property is for epub3 */
  max-width: 100%; /* This property is for epub3 */
  overflow: hidden !important;
}

.picWrapper {
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  height: 100%; /* This property is for epub3 */
}

.pic { /* This is the epub2 layer */
  display: block;
  margin: auto;
  width: 100%;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0; bottom: 0; left: 0; right: 0;
}

The code used in the xhtml file would be:

<body class="cover">
  <div class="picWrapper">
    <svg class="pic" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="100%" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 1000 1500" width="100%" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><image height="1500" width="1000" xlink:href="../Images/cover.jpeg"/></svg>
  </div>
</body>

[JSWolf]

This is the code I use. It's simple and it works in ePub2 and ePub3.

HTML

<div class="cover">
<img alt="" class="cover" src="../images/MSRCover.jpg"/>
</div>

CSS

body {
  widows: 1;
  orphans: 1;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  margin-left: 0;
  text-align: justify;
}
img {
  max-height: 100%;
  max-width: 100%;
}
.cover {
  text-align: center;
  text-indent: 0;
  height: 100%;
}