Instructions for patching firmware 4.13.12638

[Ripplinger]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

@the.Mtn.Man / @Ripplinger and others:

Patience, young padawan.

PS: It's nothing new, patches have often/always been released in a staggered manner, depending on what's ready or not.

I'm perfectly happy waiting until all patches are ready, or as already said, if not ready, just skipping this patch. I never immediately install any of Kobo's updates until there's some feedback because of the likelihood of new bugs.

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

I've noticed that the advanced font settings "hold" across patches even if you don't have advanced font controls enabled, so you still get the advantage of your customized settings even if you can't change them until the patch is updated.

That's good to know for the future if there's ever a patch I must have (although that's very unlikely to ever happen in my case... if it ain't broke and all that).

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by the.Mtn.Man

I've noticed that the advanced font settings "hold" across patches even if you don't have advanced font controls enabled, so you still get the advantage of your customized settings even if you can't change them until the patch is updated.

I believe this happens because Kobo stores the settings in the configuration file, and independently from any patch retrieves these values. This should actually imply that one could manually edit the configuration file to add the required settings

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by PeterT

I believe this happens because Kobo stores the settings in the configuration file, and independently from any patch retrieves these values. This should actually imply that one could manually edit the configuration file to add the required settings

Which is something I have done in the past and does work. Of course, it's hard to get it right.

[GeoffR]

I don't know if this will work, and even if it does then there might be side-effects for Japanese or Chinese language books, but if someone wants to try it and find out ...

Freedom to advanced fonts control, paste into libnickel.so.1.0.0.yaml:

Spoiler:

Freedom to advanced fonts control:
  - Enabled: no
  - Description: |
      This patch allows the advanced font options (weight/sharpness adjustments)
      to work with sideloaded fonts too. (KEPUB: OTF and TTF. EPUB: TTF only.)
      Beware unknown side-effects for Japanese or Chinese language books.
    #
    # The following passes a junk pointer to N3FontTypeUtil::setupDropdown, but it
    # seems the pointer is only passed on to ReadingSettings::getDefaultFontFamily
    # where the code is patched to avoid dereferencing it, so it should be safe.
    # BEWARE: What are the side-effects for Japanese / Chinese language books?
    #
    # N3FontTypeUtil.setupMonotypeDropdown(b,c)
    # --> N3FontTypeUtil.setupDropdown(UNDEFINED,b,c)
  - ReplaceBytes: {Offset: 0x8432E4, FindH: 59 46 50 46, ReplaceH: 5A 46 51 46}
  - ReplaceBLX: {Offset: 0x8432E8, Find: 0x4073B8, Replace: 0x41F440}
    # N3FontTypeController.setupAdvancedOption(...) --> NOP
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x9FB23A, FindBLX: 0x422810}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x9FC1D0, FindBLX: 0x422810}
    # Ignore volume language (affects language number 25; ja? zh?)
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7EA, FindBLX: 0x415B74}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7F0, FindBLX: 0x41D354}
  - ReplaceBytes: {Offset: 0x65F7F4, FindH: 06 46, ReplaceH: 00 26}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7F8, FindBLX: 0x40E5B4}

[geek1011]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I don't know if this will work, and even if it does then there might be side-effects for Japanese or Chinese language books, but if someone wants to try it and find out ...

Yep, that works well. I was thinking it was something along those lines. Thanks!

If you want, you can add it to the repo, and I'll do a release.

[geek1011]

v44 is out with the 4 missing patches updated (GeoffR), 2 new patches added (geek1011), and the conflicts with the home screen patches fixed (geek1011).

[codychan]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I don't know if this will work, and even if it does then there might be side-effects for Japanese or Chinese language books, but if someone wants to try it and find out ...

Freedom to advanced fonts control, paste into libnickel.so.1.0.0.yaml:

Spoiler:

Freedom to advanced fonts control:
  - Enabled: no
  - Description: |
      This patch allows the advanced font options (weight/sharpness adjustments)
      to work with sideloaded fonts too. (KEPUB: OTF and TTF. EPUB: TTF only.)
      Beware unknown side-effects for Japanese or Chinese language books.
    #
    # The following passes a junk pointer to N3FontTypeUtil::setupDropdown, but it
    # seems the pointer is only passed on to ReadingSettings::getDefaultFontFamily
    # where the code is patched to avoid dereferencing it, so it should be safe.
    # BEWARE: What are the side-effects for Japanese / Chinese language books?
    #
    # N3FontTypeUtil.setupMonotypeDropdown(b,c)
    # --> N3FontTypeUtil.setupDropdown(UNDEFINED,b,c)
  - ReplaceBytes: {Offset: 0x8432E4, FindH: 59 46 50 46, ReplaceH: 5A 46 51 46}
  - ReplaceBLX: {Offset: 0x8432E8, Find: 0x4073B8, Replace: 0x41F440}
    # N3FontTypeController.setupAdvancedOption(...) --> NOP
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x9FB23A, FindBLX: 0x422810}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x9FC1D0, FindBLX: 0x422810}
    # Ignore volume language (affects language number 25; ja? zh?)
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7EA, FindBLX: 0x415B74}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7F0, FindBLX: 0x41D354}
  - ReplaceBytes: {Offset: 0x65F7F4, FindH: 06 46, ReplaceH: 00 26}
  - ReplaceBytesNOP: {Offset: 0x65F7F8, FindBLX: 0x40E5B4}

Installed v44 patches, and tried "Freedom to advanced fonts control" for a few Chinese books, so far so good.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by codychan

Installed v44 patches, and tried "Freedom to advanced fonts control" for a few Chinese books, so far so good.

That's good. My guess is that the firmware is trying to set the defaut font for Chinese books to the new Chinese font, and the side-effect of the patch is that it gets set to Georgia instead. You might only see a difference if you select the "Pubisher Default" font and the publisher hasn't set their own font from the book's stylesheet.

[codychan]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

That's good. My guess is that the firmware is trying to set the defaut font for Chinese books to the new Chinese font, and the side-effect of the patch is that it gets set to Georgia instead. You might only see a difference if you select the "Pubisher Default" font and the publisher hasn't set their own font from the book's stylesheet.

Oh, I'm reading Simplified Chinese books instead of Traditional Chinese books which the new firmware supports.

And since I got solution to work around the problem of reading Simplified Chinese books a long time ago, this new feature that kobo supports Traditional Chinese language doesn't help at all. The Simplified Chinese characters in the library list are still not rendered correctly after power-on, which is a sad thing, I guessed it should fix it before installing the new firmware.

But if I set the font to "Pubisher Default", it does use the new Chinese font and it works fine like the old firmware since I used a work-around.

[LucyOne]

Originally Posted by geek1011

New patches in this version:
- Remove extra space on selection menu (geek1011)

Thanks for updating the patches so quickly!
This new one is really useful.

Could some post a screenshot of before and after applying this patch? I'm not sure whether it really worked on my Kobo Clara. The selection menu still looks quite big.

[Semwize]

geek1011,
everything works fine, as always.

You wrote that you are ready to make a patch for replacing the Kobo store with a browser or beta functions.

Just remind, suddenly you forgot

[the.Mtn.Man]

Thanks for getting the fixes out so fast!

However, I'm having trouble with "Dictionary text font-family/font-size/line-height - beta". I follow the directions and uncomment the appropriate lines, but I keep encountering the following error:

Patching ./usr/local/Kobo/libnickel.so.1.0.0
Error: could not apply patches: could not load patch file 'src/libnickel.so.1.0.0.yaml': could not parse patch file: error parsing patch file: yaml: line 1587: did not find expected key

The line number changes depending on which option I uncomment, but the error is otherwise the same. Here's the line that caused the compiler to spit out the last error:

- ReplaceString: {Offset: 0x36, Find: "Georgia ", Replace: "Bookerly", MustMatchLength: yes}

[Semwize]

the.Mtn.Man,
front should be 2 spaces

  - ReplaceString:

maybe you didn't put them in.

I have no mistakes.

[JohhnyMix]

First of all i want to thank everyone who puts in their time to make this like this available for everyone and you guys are the best!

Now, with the new patch i still have the problem where the CMD windows closes when to apply the New home screen increasing cover size:" patch

[the.Mtn.Man]

Originally Posted by Semwize

the.Mtn.Man,
front should be 2 spaces

  - ReplaceString:

maybe you didn't put them in.

I have no mistakes.

OK, that was it. I didn't realize that spacing mattered, so I just deleted the # character instead of replacing it with a space.

Thanks for the help!