4.34.20097 firmware Arabic in titles book Kobo

[itcanalu]

this post is an old problem posted by mamado
Now in 2022 i've the same problem and i don't find the solution with the last firmware 4.34.20097

Mamado's post:
Hi,
I have few Arabic books in pdf and epub and Arabic articles in Pocket, I added few fonts to the device (Arial, Calibri, Cambria, Symplified Arabic) and the contents of the epub books and Pocket articles are now readable.

I have two problems though:

1- The book titles are unreadable.

If the book title and author are in Arabic, The library view show only the author name, and shows blocks (rectangles) instead of characters for the title.
Is there a way to properly show the titles?



2- There is no way to search the library using arabic characters, as I couldn't find a way to enable Arabic in the keyboard.
Can you please let me know how to enable arabic keyboard?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Best Regards,
Mohamed.


Link: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=255575

[Colonel Cathcart]

I experience the same problems with Hebrew books. Specifically, to try answer your questions:
1. I open a Hebrew book a flip a few pages. After that all Hebrew book titles do show up properly. Maybe you'll need to select an Arabic font as a fallback font? This is mostly a one-time thing till the next restart or firmware update. Lately I had to do that a very few times after side loading more books. I don't know why. I contacted Kobo customer support, I hope you'll do the same to so they'll know of more people affected by this issue and give it a higher priority, hopefully.

2. There's a patch in libnickel that replaces the 2nd keyboard, and I bet it could be adapted to Arabic
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=349230

Someone, it seems, did that in the past:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...rabic+keyboard

Still, I wonder how typing words using this keyboard will work. Will it still be right-to-left? I'm not sure, I haven't tried this myself.

Edit

3. Actually, there's a 3rd big issue: I can't browse or borrow Hebrew books using Overdrive directly from my Kobo device. Also, borrowed books from the libby app will not sync. I have to go through ADE and the authorization thing is a bit finicky. The reason for that, or so I was told here on some other thread is because the Kobo store doesn't offer those Hebrew books for sale.

[lensmann]

To amplify a bit on Colonel Cathcart's post, the issue you're facing is one that is common to all languages in a script Kobo doesn't list as a supported language. I have the same issue as well, with books and Pocket articles in Yiddish (which uses the Hebrew script). Kobo supports Unicode very well so it's possible to get the script to work, but you will need to jump through a few hoops.

1. To get book titles in Arabic to display properly, you'll need to make sure you've set a supplemental font that supports Arabic. You will then need to get the Kobo to load the Arabic glyphs from the font. The easiest way to do this is to open a book or Pocket article in Arabic. Once you've done that, all titles in Arabic for books as well as Pocket articles will display properly. I've only tested this with the Hebrew script, but it should work in precisely the same way for Arabic. If the titles stop displaying, just repeat the process of opening a book or an article, and they'll start displaying again.

2. Current versions of the patches for the keyboard don't include Hebrew or Arabic. It should be possible to take the code for the Arabic keys in this version of the patches (starting at line 1006) and adapt them for the equivalent file in the current version. But it is probably sensible to ask someone in the Kobo Developer's Corner forum to check what you've done before you install it on your Kobo. I couldn't manage to get the original version of the Hebrew keyboard to work with the diacritics you need for Yiddish, so adapting it to the current version isn't something I've tried to do myself. But it should in principle be possible.