Document reader bold font

Hi,

I'm wondering how to display bold font in the document reader in an epub. I've been able to get both underlined and italic characters by using the Edit Book feature of Calibre and surrounding characters with <u>字</u> or <i>字</i>. However, when I use <b>字</b>, although the character shows up in bold font in the Calibre reader on my computer and in another reader on my tablet (the Boox default reader), it doesn't show up as bold in Pleco.

Thanks!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Do bold Chinese characters appear correctly elsewhere in Pleco? (they might not if for example you've installed a custom Chinese font) What about if you download a demo of one of our paid ebooks, do they appear correctly in that?

Honestly our EPUB support on Android is fairly rudimentary at the moment - main focus is on being able to extract readable text, we're not necessarily too particular about formatting - so it may simply be that some combination of other formatting features in this EPUB are conflicting with the bold tags in such a way that they don't render correctly, but if bold Chinese text is not working anywhere in Pleco that should be easier to fix.
 
Do bold Chinese characters appear correctly elsewhere in Pleco?

It looks like it, yes:

Screenshot_20220101.png


Are there any workarounds to force bold text? Or would a different file type be preferable (I can use Calibre to convert to most of the major ones).

My backup plan is to convert to PDF which does show the bold font. However, it's a bit too easy to move the PDF page off of the screen by accident (there isn't a way to maximize the PDF page making it match the width/height of the reader screen is there? And a way to then keep it that way and not have it move off the screen if swiped? Thanks!)
 
Last edited:

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Are there any workarounds to force bold text? Or would a different file type be preferable (I can use Calibre to convert to most of the major ones).

Maybe <strong> tags will work better than <b>? Not much else to suggest at the moment side from that.

However, it's a bit too easy to move the PDF page off of the screen by accident (there isn't a way to maximize the PDF page making it match the width/height of the reader screen is there? And a way to then keep it that way and not have it move off the screen if swiped? Thanks!)

No, that's also a bit rudimentary at the moment. One other thing you could try is opening your file in a third party EPUB or PDF reader and then using Screen Reader / Screen OCR to look up words in it in Pleco.

Just in general the Android document reader reflects the limitations of trying to keep an app working on every Android version from 4 to 12 (well not 4 anymore but a lot of design decisions were still keyed to that); at whatever point we bring our big redesign to Android we plan to severely tighten up the system requirements and retool EPUB/PDF parsing around that, but I don't have a whole lot to suggest on this front in the meantime.
 
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