Odd ebook formatting behaviour with epubs

[bandit]

Hello, everyone. I don't know if anyone can help with this, but I'm gonna ask anyway.

When I import, convert, update metadata, or otherwise just breathe on an epub file lately that I have... um... acquired from the interwebs I get a very strange behaviour from Calibre. The first three, four, five, or six letters in a word get shown in BOLD. The rest of the letters in the word then are displayed normally. This is displayed like this regardless of device I open the book in. I've tried it on my Kindle Fire HD 10 (9th gen), Kindle Fire HD 10 Plus (11th gen), Various generations of Paperwhites I own, my iPhone with the Kindle iOS app, and viewing it in Calibre in the built-in ebook viewer.

This is my process:

Add book to Calibre
Download/update metadata, along with the best resolution cover I can find
Save to disk folder (still as an epub)
Send to Kindle (using Amazon's app)
After this, I usually batch convert a bunch of books to KFX overnight since they run so slowly (not every time, though)

Sometimes, I will upload the original file I downloaded before I imported it to Calibre via Send to Kindle app if I've checked it's metadata and discovered it to be complete as-is.

This makes the books quite hard to read, obviously. If you wish, I can upload an epub that displays the behaviour, but that may be against the forum's rules. You can PM me for a work-around if that is agreeable.

My particulars:

Computer running Calibre is an iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013) running MacOS Catalina 10.15.7
Calibre version is 6.11 (most recent compatible with Catalina)

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide!

[Sirtel]

You'll have to look at the code in the calibre editor, to determine what the issue is.

[jhowell]

That sounds a lot like Bionic Reading.

[bandit]

YES! It looks just like this "Bionic Reading", jhowell. I wonder if a switch got flipped somewhere, somehow.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by bandit

YES! It looks just like this "Bionic Reading", jhowell. I wonder if a switch got flipped somewhere, somehow.

calibre does not support Bionic Hogwash (er Reading).

[retiredbiker]

Open the book in the Calibre Editor. Look in the code view, the centre pane. You may see coding like this on the words with the bold letters:

<b>exa</b>mple <b>phra</b>se

or

<span class="bold">exa</span>mple <span class="bold">phra</span>se (the actual class could be called anything, just guessing "bold")

If this is the case, just get rid of those tags with search and replace (replace with nothing).

[bandit]

yes, hogwash is the right term for it. For me, it makes it more difficult to read, and harder to get "into" the story, if you know what I mean. I still wonder how this happens, and how to fix it. It's weird - I've tried epub-mobi-epub conversions (which worked, sometimes), but I've three new books that were downloaded as mobi's, converted to epub, which now show this behaviour. Epub-KFX conversions don't work to fix the issue.

[jhowell]

Could you have installed one of the Epub Metaguider plugins into calibre? Those will add Bionic Reading formatting to books.

[Quoth]

Bionic reading and Open Dyslexic font are really "art" projects with no scientific basis.

[bandit]

jhowell, thanks for the tip about the plugins. It turned out that I did, in fact, install the epub metaguider plugins by some horrendous mistake. Now, I must find each and every book that was corrupted like this and either redownload it, or figure out some method of conversion to fix it. But, that's my problem now. Thanks ever so much for discovering the cause of the issue.