ePub book content overlap lines and are unreadable

[fabiocolacio]

Books in the epub format (I have not tested other formats) are unreadable in Fedora 28.

These screenshots are taken in Fedora 28, with bookworm compiled from git-master:

The default view with no settings changed:

With two-page reading enabled:

[babluboy]

@fabiocolacio Thanks for your interest in Bookworm. On first thoughts this does not look like a distro issue. Although I have not seen this on eOS, I am thinking it’s specific to the ePub formatting which is making the rendering bad.

Any chance you can share the ePub file with me on this issue or on my email (bablu.boy@gmail.com) so that I can test it.

[fabiocolacio]

Hi @babluboy,

That seems like a probable cause of for this issue. All of the books I have tested come from Project Gutenberg, and thus they are likely to be formatted in a similar manner. Every book I have tried from this site has had the same issues (I do not have any other epubs to test aside from these).

The particular file shown in the screenshots above is White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg here (choosing images or no-images made no difference in my testing).

I should add that the same files render properly in other epub readers I have tested including libgepub, mupdf, and Calibre.

[babluboy]

Thanks @fabiocolacio . I downloaded the book and can replicate the issue - so not distro specific for sure. I have not seen this on any of my other ePubs (from other sources), so webkit is not able to render a specific formating on the Guttenburg ePubs (same issue with a couple of other epubs). I also noticed a few points:

• The overlaped text only occurs for the first chapter and not for the rest of the book
• The margin increase/decrease function does not work on the first chapter but works fine with the rest of the chapters
• The text on the first chapter appears like a column, but when I open the html file of the first chapter on the browser it looks good, so must be something with the CSS i'm overlaying which messes up the page

Will look into this further

[babluboy]

Just checked this by opening the HTML on a webkit and there is no overlap. So this narrows it down to the fact that the CSS i'm applying is somehow messing up the formatting. Should not be hard to debug and fix.

[babluboy]

Made the CSS for handling the cover image specific to images - the generic * was causing the CSS to be applied to text making the overlap in line height