epub - If hyphenation is enabled in Calibre, output looks bad

[bebraw]

It looks like there might be something weird going on with the output (or it's a Calibre bug). If you open up the output in the reader provided with Calibre, it looks a little off. Demo epub.

[SamyPesse]

What version of calibre are you using? because it's working fine for me on calibre (latest: 1.39.0) and ibooks

[bebraw]

1.39. I just picked the distro from their site. I'm on OS X 10.9.3 by the way.

In order to repro the issue you will need to enable hyphenation. See below:

[SamyPesse]

Ok, but I think this is not a bug of gitbook. But please take a look at http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/cli/ebook-convert.html to see if there something we can do about this.

[bebraw]

Yeah, it's most likely an issue in Calibre itself. Maybe --disable-dehyphenate is worth a go? Apart from that I cannot see anything useful there.

[SamyPesse]

Can you test it by hard-coding in lib/generate/ebook/index.js to add this option.

[bebraw]

Can you test it by hard-coding in lib/generate/ebook/index.js to add this option.

Sure. I added

"--disable-dehyphenate": true,

to options there. No difference in output. It's something different.

Maybe it's worth our while to ping the Calibre guys. It might be something simple.

[SamyPesse]

Yes, I think there is a github repo for calibre

[bebraw]

Yes, I think there is a github repo for calibre

Unfortunately there's no issue tracker at GitHub. They maintain it at Launchpad. I'll try that as a last resort.

I tried poking people at IRC and Twitter without success. Now there's a forum thread for the issue, http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2844002 . Hopefully that will give us a better idea.

[bebraw]

@SamyPesse Just got a reply from the creator of Calibre. I've attached it below:

hyphenation in the calibre viewer works using the hyphenate.js library which inserts soft-hyphens into the text. From the screenshot you posted the softhyphens are being rendered as blanks, most likely because of some text rendering/font css in your book.

So my guess is that it would be possible to resolve the issue by tweaking CSS appropriately.

[SamyPesse]

Can you test with the latest version, I disabled most of the css in the new books: https://www.gitbook.io/book/gitbookio/javascript

[bebraw]

Can you test with the latest version, I disabled most of the css in the new books: https://www.gitbook.io/book/gitbookio/javascript

I downloaded epub version of that book and opened it in Calibre. The issue is still visible. See below.