Libra Missing Hebrew diacritic symbols (Nikud) from book?

[Colonel Cathcart]

I side-loaded a Hebrew book I borrowed from the library (using libby), and while reading it using the publisher default font(s), I came across a place in the text that some diacritic symbols' glyphs were missing from the publisher font, or so it seems. The end result was rendered owefuly, compared to using a side-loaded font. Interestingly, when using the built-in Kobo Nickel font, it seems to have picked a font with Hebrew glyphs in order to render the text, but that font seems to have those missing diacritic symbols as well.
Is there anyway to verify what's the source of the problem? Is the publisher font really missing those glyphs?

Edit: I should've added that the book renders perfectly in ADE.
Edit2: As a side note, here's another example of the display issue I reported here (also to Kobo, directly), only this time when the title is mixed Hebrew and English which turns out much messier.

I've attached some screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

For those interested, here's the English Wiki page about those symbols:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niqqud

[Quoth]

I guess it's less tested as often only children's text and religious texts have the dots etc.

It's appalling and obviously a Kobo bug since the document works in ADE, and if you use epub rather than kepub, the Kobo is using essentially ADE.

It would certainly be very annoying. It's crazy how US Centric everything is. Non-Roman-latin fonts and mixed language display was a solved problem over 10 years before the first Kindle, including on the underlying Linux.

The Kindle DXG I have is only useable for Latin-Roman, with a few modern greek and Scandi glyphs. The Irish Health service can't do the Irish áéíóú at all. Words without mean something different.
The gh, ph, mh, bh, dh etc in Irish used to have a dot instead of h. It's the opposite sense to the same letters in Hebrew that take a dot for hard/soft. Also Irish historically had no dot on i to differentiate from í. The dots and dotless i were killed off by the English typewriter in the late Victorian era. It's nearly impossible to do Old Irish on a computer at all. There are only a few hard to find poorly done fonts.

The USA also seems to also ignore the vast proportion of Spanish speakers.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I guess it's less tested as often only children's text and religious texts have the dots etc.

Yes, that is true, when it comes to complete texts. Other than that it is common to sporadically use it in texts when it comes to names (people, locations), at least for the 1st occurrence in the text, especially when they're not too common, or else, it'll be pretty hard to properly pronunciate. Think of it as English mostly without vowels. For example, in this case, without the diacritics, it's hard to guess that Somrst (or Sumrst?) should be pronounced Somerset, or James Clmo (or Clmoo?) is, indeed James Clemo.

Originally Posted by Quoth

It's appalling and obviously a Kobo bug since the document works in ADE, and if you use epub rather than kepub, the Kobo is using essentially ADE.

So sorry for not mentioning it earlier, I'm still new to all of this. This is a kepub.epub file.

[PeterT]

It would be interesting to have the books title to see if one could borrow this book and explore it.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Think of it as English mostly without vowels.
So sorry for not mentioning it earlier, I'm still new to all of this. This is a kepub.epub file.

See if simply editing the filename without the kepub part fixes it if you can't remove DRM and convert to epub2.

The kepub is proprietary Kobo and renders less accurately, despite having extra features, so try it as epub, either by renaming (delete and recopy renamed version so as to update kobo database) or conversion with Calibre to epub2, if possible.

Plenty of English catches out people not from England! I stayed not far from Worcester. Rough, tough and dough? Also pronunciation or not of penultimate 'r' and of the vowels is totally regional.

It's fun hearing visitors trying to pronounce Irish place names, because despite using a Roman like alphabet 1000 years before Anglo-Saxon Runes existed, the pronunciation might be closer to Hindi and Hebrew than any European language, though there are Latin loan words earlier than in English, like for gold and silver.
I once knew more Hebrew than Irish and still know almost no Irish due to going to the wrong sort of school.

[JSWolf]

Don't send this particular eBook to your Kobo as a KePub. Send it as an ePub so it can be displayed using RMSDK. Also, side load a font that does Hebrew well and sleect that.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by PeterT

It would be interesting to have the books title to see if one could borrow this book and explore it.

The book is Burnt Paper Sky by Gilly Macmillan.
In Hebrew: שמי נייר בוערים by ג׳ילי מקמילן
Not sure if you'll all be able to access it, but it won't hurt to try: https://share.libbyapp.com/title/4366660

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Don't send this particular eBook to your Kobo as a KePub. Send it as an ePub so it can be displayed using RMSDK. Also, side load a font that does Hebrew well and sleect that.

hmm, I didn't consider that. I'll try that and report back.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Don't send this particular eBook to your Kobo as a KePub. Send it as an ePub so it can be displayed using RMSDK. Also, side load a font that does Hebrew well and sleect that.

Basically that's what I was also saying. I think that kepub is a nice idea, but buggy in rendering.

[Owl_]

I reported this issue about the popup dictionary window. I do not understand: there are many not copyrighted fonts with tons of glyphs of whatsoever language, and it has not been built-in yet one

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by Owl_

I reported this issue about the popup dictionary window. I do not understand: there are many not copyrighted fonts with tons of glyphs of whatsoever language, and it has not been built-in yet one

Yes, the side-loaded font I use if Heebo, from https://fonts.google.com/

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

The book is Burnt Paper Sky by Gilly Macmillan.
In Hebrew: שמי נייר בוערים by ג׳ילי מקמילן
Not sure if you'll all be able to access it, but it won't hurt to try:

Unfortunately not available at my library (Toronto Public Library), and also not at the Kobo bookstore (at least in Canada; I've yet to try changing to a different location).

So when you obtained the book, was it in ePub or kepub format? If ePub, how was the conversion to kepub done?

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Unfortunately not available at my library (Toronto Public Library), and also not at the Kobo bookstore (at least in Canada; I've yet to try changing to a different location).

That doesn't surprise me, the publisher is Israeli.
afaik, you can browse the books available in Libby/overdrive (but not borrow). You can pick any Israeli public library (Tel Aviv, for example). The book catalog, I'm told, is the same no matter which one you pick.

Originally Posted by PeterT

So when you obtained the book, was it in ePub or kepub format? If ePub, how was the conversion to kepub done?

Yes, originally, it was an ePub, I DeDRM-ed it, and converted it to kepub with Calibre.

[Semwize]

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Yes, originally, it was an ePub, I DeDRM-ed it

Originally Posted by Colonel Cathcart

Is there anyway to verify what's the source of the problem? Is the publisher font really missing those glyphs?

What's stopping you from opening the archive (or using Sigil) and seeing which font the publisher is using?

And then find out if the font used by the publisher supports Niqqud.

It doesn't matter what you use, epub or kepub. Unless you messed up the book while converting.

[MGlitch]

I doubt you’ll get much traction from reporting an issue with Hebrew books to Kobo given that they don’t list Hebrew as a supported language. Should it work regardless yeah probably. But since they don’t claim it, the higher ups are unlikely to push the devs to fix it unless it’s a bug affecting supported languages as well.

[Colonel Cathcart]

Originally Posted by Semwize

What's stopping you from opening the archive (or using Sigil) and seeing which font the publisher is using?

And then find out if the font used by the publisher supports Niqqud.

It doesn't matter what you use, epub or kepub. Unless you messed up the book while converting.

OK, this is awkward. I peeked inside the file and I found no embedded fonts. I double-checked, and Calibre's Edit Book->Tools->Manage Fonts shows no embedded fonts. When I tried embedding those fonts, Calibre managed to find just one, Times New Roman, installed on my PC.

So I peeked inside a couple of other books I borrowed and it's, roughly, the same deal. I wasn't expecting that.

WTF!