Non-italic book titles and so on, access to Japanese keyboard

[tshering]

I would like to share what I did in order to have no italics in the user interface and (more important to me) to gain access to the Japanese keyboard while still seeing the menus in English. This is now even more useful, as the Japanese dictionary is searchable (since around FW 3.16.10).

This is just for information for those who like to tinker. I do not have a good idea how to provide tools so that everybody who wishes so can easily do this by herself. (Edit: This part is obsolete.)

I extracted the English translation file from nickel, named it trans_ja.qm, and copied it to usr/local/Kobo/translations. Then I set the user language to Japanese.

This hack survives FW updates. It has to be reapplied only after FW resets or (Edit: the second condition does not hold for the solution provided in post #2) if the translation strings of the GUI changes significantly with a new FW.

Side effects: The date in Settings/Date Time is displayed in Japanese.

While writing this post, I think I found an easy way to make this available to everybody. I have to test this idea. (Edit: I tested it, and it works.)

[tshering]

Installation:

• extract KoboRoot.tgz from the uploaded archive
• copy it to .kobo of your device, safely eject and disconnect
• after the device has rebooted, select Japanese as user language (Settings > Language > 日本語)

This will survive FW updates.

Note: This works only for English. For other languages you would have to apply the suggestions in post #1 (but of course extract the qm file of your language, or create a qm file of your language yourself, cf. this thread).


Uninstall:
Use uninstall_qms.zip which is uploaded to this post.

[tshering]

I upload some pictures that demonstrate the effect of this hack on the appearance of the GUI. The first three images show a comparison between the regular English GUI (left) and the modified Japanese GUI. The fourth image shows the Search in Dictionary screen with the Japanese dictionary selected. The display of the characters is less than perfect, but this is not related to the hack. The fifth image shows a full screen page of the dictionary.

[barobach_so]

hi
nice work
how you do this that your patches survives FW updates ?
can u create a blank template for your patch that others can change only keyboard template ( I mean no whole device language, as you said menus in Eng but native language keyboard )

[tshering]

Originally Posted by barobach_so

hi
nice work
how you do this that your patches survives FW updates ?
can u create a blank template for your patch that others can change only keyboard template ( I mean no whole device language, as you said menus in Eng but native language keyboard )

This hack (maybe this is already a too strong expression) does survive since it does not change any Kobo files in any way. Therefore, there is also no change of the keyboard involved. What you see is the original Japanese keyboard of the Kobo software.