[Toolpost]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

In other words, trying to customise dictionary font-family no longer works as well as it once did if you're trying to use a sideloaded custom font. The only custom fonts which have been reported as working (by various users) are those already listed as options in the patch, as per your quoted extract. As you can see they are all built-in fonts.

This is really a bad news. I have read it what you said in the libnickel.so.1.0.0.yaml file, but couldn't realise the depth of the situation.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Quite recently I discovered that using the following steps I was able to make the dictionary use a sideloaded font. I use the font-family from your quoted patch as an example below, 'Noto Sans Malayalam':

1. Load a designated kepub to your Kobo [* See Note 1 below]. It will need to remain on your Kobo permanently.
2. Open the designated kepub.
3. Use the [Aa] font menu to set the font for this book to 'Noto Sans Malayalam'. This font should be automatically stored permanently for this book in the Kobo database.
4. Long-press a word [** See Note 2 below] and choose your 'English-Malayalam' dictionary to lookup the word. This chosen dictionary should be automatically stored permanently for this book in the Kobo database.

Thanks for the workaround. If you don't notice I have mentioned it in my first post.

Originally Posted by Toolpost

The dictionary displays proper Malayalam text if I change the book font to any of the sideloaded Malayalam unicode font.

This works, but whenever I open a book, I have to change the font to another font first (enen if the current saved font is Noto Sans Malayalam), then revert back to Noto Sans Malayalam again (or any other Malayalam sideloaded font) to see the dictionary output. After that I can change the book font again to any "system font" for better rendering of the English text, the dictionary font persists as the "Noto Sans Malayalam" and will be rendered properly. So, if i do this procedure each time opening a new book, things are working fine.

So what I observed here is, Kobo saves the book font each time, but at the beginning the dictionary font is reverted back to the system font again.

For now, I did the above mentioned procedure with a regular EPUB file, since I am still using the old regular EPUB files in the reader. Only now I was reading the forums and get to know the benefits of using KEPUBs. Seems like I can do the conversion easily with a Calibre plugin. I will try with a KEPUB and update you.

Thank you very much for the response and your time.