Since my last post, I did some more research in regard to this kerning thing on Kobo devices, and I wrote a whole script to automate many of the changes I’ve been manually making to various fonts.
In particular, I wanted to automate the creation of the legacy kern table that Kobo devices use when rendering text on firmware 4.x. That’s the same thing I blogged about last time.1
Not too long ago, I released version 2.0 of my collection of tweaked fonts, and I was pretty sure I was done tweaking fonts for the rest of the year.
However, this morning I received a message in my inbox from a friendly person who linked me to an interesting post on the MobileRead forums and noted:
One suggestion would be to consider adding ‘old-style’ kern tables so that kerning works correctly when reading
kepubfiles: see e.g. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259102
Okay, that’s cool. Kerning is notoriously bad on Kobo’s kepub renderer, so perhaps it was possible to re-export my fonts and improve them even further?
Last October, when I first sought professional help after getting my depression diagnosis, and it became clear that I was going to be unable to do my job for an extended period of time.
I made a quick blog post (titled Burned Out) to inform everyone that things were not going well, and that I was going to be inactive for a bit.
It wasn’t a long post, and I closed it like so:
I have sought professional help to ensure I can recover as soon as possible, but I’ve been told that it’s going to get worse before it’s going to get better. […] When I feel better, I plan on writing a long post on the very topic. […]
So, it’s time. This is that long post I promised. Before I begin my tale, however, two important things.
Read blog postPHP Monitor 25.06 is now available with a few fresh visual touches and some minor bug fixes. Read more below for details.
While I remain on sick leave for likely the rest of the summer, I am doing better than before (I’m finally starting to get better, after getting surgery to fix serious breathing issues) and recently decided to see if I could get a little update for PHP Monitor out.
I took a look at the latest announcements Apple made at WWDC, and I made a few changes to PHP Monitor to prepare it for this fall’s update to macOS 26. Apple seems to be doing a large visual refresh across their OSes with Liquid Glass, so it’s definitely going to be an interesting release.
Read blog post