Onyx Boox bug: All fonts bold in Pocket, Overdrive

I rely on Pocket, a service and app from Mozilla, to remember long-form articles I found on the web and to read them later on my e-book readers using the Pocket app for Android.

Unfortunately, the Boox Note Pro it renders all fonts in bold in the Pocket app’s reading view. I find this extremely annoying.

To illustrate, Here are two Screenshots—one created with my phone, the other with the Boox Note Pro. I hope the difference in font weight is visible: smartphone screenshot without bold fonts, NotePro screenshot with bold fonts

The same problem occurs with the ebook-library app Overdrive.

Is there a way to disable this?

I believe the reason to be that Pocket uses Android’s stock webview widget to display content, which Onyx has changed to default to all-bold for increased contrast. It does this by applying a custom CSS, framework-res/res/raw/webview_contrast_enchanced.css, to all webview content (verified by peeking into my NotePro’s framework-res.apk).

I understand the motivation for having added this feature, but I feel that it is redundant and unnecessary on the the NotePro, which has better ways to control contrast through its “app optimization” features.

For reference, here’s a link to the Pocket app, and here’s the Overdrive app.

I regard both to be well within the set of typical apps used on an Android ereader. I’d appreciate it a lot if Onyx took measures to fix the bug that degrades their performance on the Onyx Note (Pro) … @claire?

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Have you tried to play with ‘Bold font’ and ‘Enhance text color’ settings in app optimization? I recall it had similar effect you describe.

The same experience on Nova Plus using some third party apps (Evernote for example) and also in the dictionary when using Neo Reader. Would be really nice to change that to having the option of bold fonts.

Could you please change this in the next firmware update?

Yes, I’ve tried all combinations of the enhancements offered by the Optimize feature. They are unrelated to the problem and work on top of the mistakenly used bold font weight. In fact, I feel that Optimize makes the original render-all-fonts-as-bold (mis-)feature redundant and unnecessary.

Update: I followed someone’s suggestion to contact Onyx support via the reader’s Feedback feature. Onyx support responded and asked me to try the Optimization features, which I already did to no avail. I answered them via email, pointing out the possible root cause mentioned in the original posting of this thread, and haven’t heard back since.

My O’Reilly Learning app have the same “all text bold” problem on Onyx Boox Note, which is super annoying.

Same issue here. Very annoying! I even subscribed to Pocket Premium to try to change the font but nothing happen.

I think this is related to their system-level web view styling. Unfortunately, I think it’s something only they can change.

They are taking too much time to solve this issue. I am talking to someone on support team from Pocket. I send two photos that renders the same website, one from Pocket (bold) and another from Instapaper
(not bold). I hope they could change something in their app (i have a website that i read a lot and instapaper doesn´t get the web page correctly so i can rely only with Instapaper).

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Apologize for any inconvenience that has caused. Our R&D team are working on this now.

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Hi Claire,

Thanks for the update. When do you expect the fix will be available?

Still nothing.
Plus, highlighted text isn’t rendered as highlighted in Pocket app.

Hi Clair. This happens for me too, both in the O’Reilly Learning (as mentioned by @bokertov ) and in web pages such as Notion’s user guide Start Here page . Very annoying. I’ts been months till you said your team is working on it…