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Hyphenation Problems

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Hyphenations do not always work well (especially in German). Some mistakes can be eliminated with "homemade" enhanced hyphenation files, but some not.

I wonder why the software prevents hyphenation in first lines of paragraphs. That's looking awful. Dear Kobo developers, please fix that.

Rainer

Glo Can kobo glo run android app such as nook glo?

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Hi. I'm newby. :book2:I've travelled around the 4rum and see many threads showing how to up the kobo glo firmware. I'm wondering if those firmware can help kobo glo run android apps like the nook glo. There're a lot of videos showing how to root the nook, can i do the same with my glo?

Hacks for a Kobo WiFi ?

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So I bought a Kobo Glo the other day and It's features kind of make the wifi feel obsolete.

I have stock firmware on my Kobo Wifi, (there is no internet browser or anything fun like that) I was wondering what hacks work on the wifi, and what can I do to spruce it up a bit ? Most of the hacks on this forum seem to be geared towards the Touch. Is there an Ultimate Kobo Wifi hack guide out there ?

epub formatting - full page images

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What I want to do is to embed a full page image on the Kobo, on an internal page that has a header. This page would be the first page of a chapter file.

For the cover, the html is:

Code:


<div>
    <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="100%" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 450 684" width="100%" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
        <image height="684" width="450" xlink:href="../Images/Cover.jpg"></image>
    </svg>
</div>


For the page (using the cover image as an example):

Code:


<h3>Header</h3>
<div>
  <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" height="100%" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 450 684" width="100%" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
      <image height="684" width="450" xlink:href="../Images/Cover.jpg"></image>
  </svg>
</div>

This always pus the image on a page by itself, after the page with the header.

Other experimentation has shown that with the Header, there is about 710 vertical pixels on the Glo for the image.

[Tutorial] - QT Apps without nickel

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Sorry for my bad english

We can run QT standalone apps without using nickel.
I created this tutorial for other people to learn and make something nice for our Kobo's.

First I want to thank the following people:

- sergeyvl12
- tonyv
maybe others, tell me if you belong to this list.

First, make sure you have a fully working Kobo Development enviroment (besure to compile QT 4.8.0, not 4.6
This tutorial requires also telnet/ssh!
Look at the attachments for all the files!

Step 1
Unzip the QT_drivers.zip package to /usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/plugins/

Step 2
Create a little example QT application
(run qmake in the dir, then make)
or use my one.

Step 2a
Because my fonts weren't working (rounded squares, no text), I used the fonts sergeyvl12 provided, look at the attachments file.

Step 3
make somewhere on your Kobo a new Sh script and edit it to your needs:
Code:

#!/bin/sh
#Optional: export QT_PLUGIN_PATH=/mnt/onboard/checkers/qt_plugins
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/lib
export QWS_MOUSE_PROTO=KindleTS
export QWS_DISPLAY=Transformed:kindlefb:Rot90
#unzip fonts to /mnt/onboard
export QT_QWS_FONTDIR=/mnt/onboard/fonts
killall nickel
#run your app
/mnt/onboard/Kobo_QT_Example -qws

Step 4
Run the sh script you just saved

To exit the program tap CTRL+C, to go back to nickel you need to restart the device or run the SH script from here: http://pastebin.com/gEuQpaU5

If all went well you see something like this:


Messagebox:


Ofcourse not in color ;)


Let me know if you got problems or tips, I hope I didn't forget something.

Attached Files
File Type: zip QT_drivers.zip (37.9 KB)
File Type: zip Kobo_QT_Example.zip (12.1 KB)
File Type: zip fonts.zip (4.20 MB)

Take screenshot from Kobo

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Thanks to this link: http://www.cnx-software.com/2010/07/...er-screenshot/
we can make screenshot from our Kobo screen.

* requires telnet

run this command:
Code:

cat /dev/fb0 > screen.raw
get the screen.raw via ftp to you local computer that's running PERL.

Create a new perl script with this contents:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$w = shift || 240;
$h = shift || 320;
$pixels = $w * $h;

open OUT, "|pnmtopng" or die "Can't pipe pnmtopng: $!\n";

printf OUT "P6%d %d\n255\n", $w, $h;

while ((read STDIN, $raw, 2) and $pixels--) {
  $short = unpack('S', $raw);
  print OUT pack("C3",
      ($short & 0xf800) >> 8,
      ($short & 0x7e0) >> 3,
      ($short & 0x1f) << 3);
}

close OUT;

Chmod +x FILE.sh

after that run this:
change the resolution to your Kobo screen (I have a kobo Glo)
Code:

./FILE.SH 1024 758 < screen.raw > screen.png
And there you go, screen.png contains you Kobo Sreenshot.

KoboLauncher for standalone Qt apps

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Hi!

I've written a small launcher program for my Qt applications: pbchess, checkers, reversi (othello) and sokoban. All the programs work well with my Kobo Touch. They also should work with Glo and Mini

Download path:

http://pbchess.vlasovsoft.net/files/...1.2.5_kobo.zip (Sorry! not available till 8 Jan)

Installation:

1. Unpack the archive
2. Copy the following folders into the ".kobo" directory of your kobo reader: KoboLauncher, checkers, pbchess-1.2.5, reversi, sokoban.
3. Set up your koboplugins.ini (you must have plugin interface installed):

[CustomCommands]
...
Launcher=Plugin::executeSystemCmd("/mnt/onboard/.kobo/KoboLauncher/KoboLauncher.sh")
...

4. Profit!

You can add another applications in the KoboLauncher. Just edit KoboLauncher/KoboLauncher.ini.

Source code for KoboLauncher and Qt Kobo plugins:

http://pbchess.vlasovsoft.net/files/kobo/kobo.zip (Sorry! not available till 8 Jan)

Please write a "Notes" application.

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Please developpers, could you write a "Notes" application ?
When I switched to a Kobo Glo, the one (from a Soiny PRS-T1), the one missing feature is a "notes" applications... Anyone care to add one ?

Custom Chinese-English dictionary

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Custom Chinese-English dictionary

As a side product of my Japanese-English dictionary (cf. Custom Japanese-English dictionary) I produced a Chinese-English dictionary based on CC-CEDICT.

Installation: In order to use this dictionary you need FW 2.3.1 or higher. Rename cedict4kobo.zip to dicthtml-ja.zip and copy it to .kobo\dict\ of the reader. Be aware that you will lose your Japanese definition dictionary by this. For a general description of the installation process, cf. New custom English dictionaries.

The reading experience will improve (auto selection of the dictionary) by changing the language of the epub from Chinese to Japanese.

I welcome feedback.

Attached Files
File Type: zip cedict4kobo.zip (8.31 MB)

Write to screen from shell?

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Does anyone know if there is any utility included that can write to the screen from a shell? In kindles there's eips, so I think there should be a similar tool.

Glo [WIP] Port of Kindle Paperwhite OS

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Hi everyone!
I'm posting this to see if there's enough interest, and to find someone wanting to help me out.
I'm currently working on porting the Kindle Paperwhite firmware to the Kobo Glo. This should be fairly doable since the hardware is very, very similar.
Since the software is proprietary and under copyright, everyone interested to run it will have to download the 5.3.1 update from amazon and extract it from there.

Currently I've written some scripts that mount the firmware image extracted from the update in /mnt/kindle, and then chroot there. The software should then start calling the file "/etc/upstart/framework". It still doesn't display anything.

I will provide more detailed instructions if there's anyone willing to help.
The next steps I'm facing are:
- enabling logging. I've created a /var directory but still it stays empty.
- The framebuffer on Kobos has a depth of 16 bpp, while on Kindles it is 8 or 4 (still unclear to me). I have to find a way to change the mode of the display; I've tried fbset but it does nothing.

If anyone has any knowledge especially on the last step I'd like to hear from him.
I hope that someone else will be interested in this effort :)
to the next update!

Low-level access to Kobo eink panel

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I've started hacking on the screen level on the Kobo platform.
It seems all the code we need to drive the panel is in the kernel source, under linux-2.6.35.3/drivers/video/mxc; in particular the relevant files are attached to this post.
"epdfb_dc.c" is already compilable as a stand-alone program, provided you add a "main" function to it.
I'm trying to do something useful with those functions but I haven't figured out yet how to use them. I'm sharing the info in case someone else wants to work on this.

Attached Files
File Type: zip epdfb_dc.zip (44.9 KB)

How did kobo write such slow software?

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So i'm pretty bamboozled by this.

Currently it takes 25 seconds to close a specific HTML file (a few hundred K, only 5000 odd lines) on the kobo glo - which is a 1Ghz cpu. Attrocious. (and the fact it hard-locks the machine whilst doing it is even worse, haven't they heard of threads?)

The only way I can think is that they did something really dumb like:

array[] all_lines;
while (line = remove_first_element_shifting_the_rest_up(all_line s)) {
free(line);
}

Despite using Java, which is supposedly 'slow' (it isn't, although tbh the arm implementation isn't as efficient as x86), my experiments are:
- faster start up time
- much much more responsive to touches
- never misses finger motions
- quicker rendering
- etc.

Whereas the kobo touch/glo is:
- slow as a wet week in almost every single operation, even pressing a button is slow

After another 12 months I would have expected it to be really amazing - the hardware is really very very competent, and the CPU is many times faster than the eink display can possible keep up with.

It makes their product feel like rubbish, but it's not the hardware's fault.

Kobo Glo: how to replace boot image

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Hi All,

I'm new to this forum and the Glo is my first ebook reader, thanks to this forum it took me just a few minutes to enable telnet and get root !!!

Thanks to everybody!

Now I would like to replace the boot/standby image with something more fancy (a pirate flag would do ;) .

I've read something about placing an image in the upgrade folder of the user partition but all the instructions were for other models and they said that the image format and size is important.

Does anybody have more informations about the kobo glo image format and size for replacing it?

Plugin calibre epub to kepub

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Hi everyone,

I have found this github https://github.com/kenjis/epub-converter
this plug in, convert automatically your Epub in kepub, and you know, kepub is very usefull but lot of problem are in it, and lot of feature too, but this, fix a problem with annotations, and normally give you cover back on your kobo.

I have installed it, but the problem is, the plug in don't add image in .kobo/libary, the modification on a sql database is good, but not the transfer of picture.
I dunno how modify a code source, i'm not so good in python, i'm trying, if a someone can help me for fix this, or do this.
this plug in is inspired by this web site :
http://dsandrei.blogspot.fr/2012/07/...99486355321782

this is the explication of Joel goguen, how it work :
Quote:

I'm working on an extension to the Calibre Kobo Touch driver to auto-magically handle most of this when sending an ePub file to a Kobo Touch/Glo/Mini. I only have a Glo to test with though, but it looks like everything should be the same from the database side. I'm using lxml directly, I found that using BeautifulSoup caused more issues than it was worth (mostly around poorly-converted ePubs or some ePubs from the Kobo store that have intermingled file encodings) and lxml handled them much better.

Here's what the driver currently does if the uploaded file ends in '.epub':
1. For all h[1-6] and p tags in every HTML file, wrap the contents of the tag in a span tag with id attribute "kobo.X.1", where X is an incrementing counter starting at 1, reset with each file. The driver checks for the existence of these span tags and skips this processing on a per-tag basis. There's no validation that existing tags aren't duplicated elsewhere so it would be a bad idea to pass a half-processed file through this. It will still work on the device, but annotations and last read position might get wonky.
2. Ensure the file name on the device ends with the required '.kepub.epub', so adding this to preferences somewhere is not required.
3. Generate the database entries for each ePub file. There's an entry for the book itself, entries for anything in toc.ncx, and an entry for each individual HTML file defined in content.opf. The database entries I add include series information and the proper Image ID, but this doesn't stop the Kobo device from processing the new books after unplugging the device, which strips out series and image ID data. Still working on how to prevent the device from automatically processing these files.
4. Every time metadata is synced to the device, re-set the Image ID field for every book entry with a NULL ImageId field.

The images are already uploaded and properly sized by Calibre so there isn't any need to deal with converting/sizing images. They (and series information, if you're setting it) won't display the first time you eject the device after copying the books but plug it back in after the Kobo does its processing, let calibre update the metadata, and it'll be ready to go.

I'm not sure it's ready for publishing yet (I'm still testing some things around ePubs, haven't tried non-ePub files yet) but the source is on Github at https://github.com/jgoguen/calibre-kobo-driver for anyone that wants to try it out. The usual disclaimers (at your own risk, your mileage may vary, back up your data before you start, not my fault if anything breaks or explodes or ignites or if Zerg start crawling out of your computer) all apply.
I think, we need to write a function, for open ebook, take a .jpeg of the cover, or take it directly with calibre, and duplicate in 3 .jpeg, one of them is : [Name of ebook]N3_LIBRARY_FULL.parsed, an other is : [Name of Ebook] N3_LIBRARY_GRID.parsed and finally : [Name of ebook] N3_FULL.parsed
the resolution of picture, we doesn't care, i have tried manuelly, with only one picture, and it work.
If you have a question, I'm here.
thank you very much for you help.
Sorry for my bad english, i'm french :(


Edit : For some User, cover book works, when he make this procedure :
-in calibre, you have to set the metadata managment to "automatic", then, copy the books in your kobo, unplug, plug back and the program calibre will send a new stream of metadata; unplug again, and you'll have your covers.
-to set the metadata managment to automatic go to Preferences | Import/Export | Sending books to devices and change it.
for me doesn't work :-(
And for you?

Glo Problems compiling Qt for Kobo Glo

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Hi guys,

I've been roaming this forum for the past 4-5 days and I really liked the idea of developing some own applications for my Kobo Glo. My ultimate goal would be to create a more comfortable pdf-reader but that is still far away :-)

I have next to none linux- and Qt-background except some playing around a few years ago and the last few days. I do however have some experience with C/C++. I run Ubuntu 12.04, installed Qt 4.8.0 (configured for ARM) and use arm-linux-guneabi-g++ for compiling. I can run standard C-executables compiled by me (like "hello world" and stuff) but as soon as I start using Qt I get stuck...

For example: If I download sergeyvl12's KoboLauncher (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=201632) and use his binaries everything is fine and the application has no errors. But if I use his source files, compile them (qmake + make) and try to run them my Glo kind of freezes. In the telnet-console i get

Code:

Loading iType.. YES
but then nothing else happens. I suspect it has something to do with the differences showing up in what i get from the 'file' command:

KoboLauncher compiled by me:

Code:

file KoboLauncher
KoboLauncher: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV),
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.31,
BuildID[sha1]=0xcd0375f0d4f08cb266fd2242ff86d41f8690d771, not stripped

sergeyvl12's binaries:

Code:

file KoboLauncher
KoboLauncher: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV),
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.16, not stripped

It would be really swell if someone could help me by telling me if my suspicions are right and how I have to reconfigure Qt/qmake or my compiler. :help:

And always remember: linux-newb here, so if you have the time: I am in no way opposed to learn what BuildID[sha1] means :D

lsof on kobo?

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Hi, has anyone available a binary of lsof that works on the kobo?

Glo Kindlepdfviewer running on Kobo Glo!

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A video is worth more than a hundred words:

for those who still need context, I've ported the application "kindlepdfviewer" to run on our kobos. Right now the port is quite rough: no rotation support, has to be launched from telnet since only the second time you run it the screen is properly configured.
But the thing is coming up nicely and I thought there was no reason to wait to announce it ;) I'm attaching precompiled binaries if someone wants to have a play, the source is being uploaded at my github account right now: https://github.com/giorgio130

Running Opera Mobile on Kobo (Glo/Touch)

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Hello,

I dont know if it is possible or if it is madness but I've tried adding Opera Mobile (the ARM version released for Meego) to the Kobo Glo (firmware 2.3.1) but it fails.

Actually I've uncompressed the above Opera archive in the Kobo root using ftp and telnet so that Opera binary is in /usr/bin/, opera lib in /usr/lib etc.
I have also created soft links to the required Qt libraries :
Code:

/usr/lib/libQtCore.so.4 -> /usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/lib/libQtCore.so.4
/usr/lib/libQtDBus.so.4 -> /usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/lib/libQtDBus.so.4
/usr/lib/libQtGui.so.4 -> /usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/lib/libQtGui.so.4
/usr/lib/libQtXml.so.4 -> /usr/local/Trolltech/QtEmbedded-4.8.0-arm/lib/libQtXml.so.4

And now I've got the following error message:
Code:

[root@(none) lib]# /usr/bin/operamobile
EINK: driver not found
Aborted

So I wonder what is that missing EINK driver (I guess it has something to do with the screen) and where to find it and how to have Opera use it (I also guess such a driver exists somewhere in the Kobo).

Debian chroot for Kobo

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Hi,

inspired by the Kindle OS thread I experimented with getting Debian wheezy to run in a chroot on my Kobo Touch and it runs pretty well. Xorg works fine with fbdev, just the touchscreen needed a bit of fixing in xorg-input-evdev since the driver sends out broken coordinates when a touch is ended (see the modified sources in the home directory in the image) and calibration (use xinput_calibrator or if that doesn't work do it manually in /etc/X11/xorg.conf).

To try it out put http://andreas.heider.io/kobo_debian/debian.ext3 http://andreas.heider.io/kobo_debian/debian.sh on your onboard storage, telnet/ssh to the kobo and run /mnt/onboard/debian.sh

I preinstalled some software from http://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=195702 so there's a nice menu and a few somewhat working programs. But since it's debian and a fully working X-server you can run whatever you want.

I'll post some screenshots and more info tomorrow.
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