Touch Kobo Touch Plugin Interface

[Rainer Zenz]

A question to the developers:

With the last firmware update top margins of lots of books became very small -just about 1 mm. Could the plugin add a wider top margin in priciple? It can hide page numbers, so it seems to be possible to influence the reading software.

I take this non existing margin for very disturbing, especially when light comes from above.

[PeterT]

The Page number display is an option that was already present in the Kobo software.

The thing to remember is that the plugin only exposes functionality that is present in the original Kobo code; it adds menu options for features already present; no more; no less.

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by touring

I guess everyone is far too busy coding to answer a simple question about functionality

Definitely too busy to answer questions that are already answered in this very thread. Come on touring it'd only take you a few minutes to read through the thread.

Great work by the developers on this! Not using the shelf feature but the rest is working very well. Wouldn't be suprised to see the actual KT devs take some of these ideas. Would love to have the plugin load automagically. As someone else described, could the plugin set it self to "not autostart" when it begins and if it comes up OK toggle autostart back on as it's last action? That way if there's a problem, it won't try to load on next boot. Thoughts?

[ah-]

The hide page numbers thing is actually something different from what the other hide page numbers option does. The tweaks-version hides the bottom label, the firmware option hides page numbers that sometimes appear on the right.

The thing to remember is that the plugin only exposes functionality that is present in the original Kobo code; it adds menu options for features already present; no more; no less.

While that's true for some things it currently does, it's possible to do a lot more. I've already thought about messing with epub formatting, when I have some time to spare I'll check it out. Having an option to ignore most formatting would be useful as well, most of the books that I sideload don't work properly in the sense that I can't change the font, the text is way too huge etc.

I hoped that this would be fixed in the official firmware soon, but it seems adding some formatting options would worth implementing.

I guess everyone is far too busy coding to answer a simple question about functionality

Fair point, I'll try to add some photos/a list of features in the next update.

Great work by the developers on this!

Thanks!

Not using the shelf feature but the rest is working very well. Wouldn't be suprised to see the actual KT devs take some of these ideas.

I'd love to see that happen. In some way, the goal of this plugin is to become redundant because all of the features have found their way into the official firmware.

Would love to have the plugin load automagically. As someone else described, could the plugin set it self to "not autostart" when it begins and if it comes up OK toggle autostart back on as it's last action? That way if there's a problem, it won't try to load on next boot. Thoughts?

The problem with that is that with the current method of loading the plugin it's not possible to get code executed automatically at boot. This would require finding another way to load the plugin, which requires be quite a bit of work.

[Rainer Zenz]

ah, today I've downgraded to FW 1.9.16. Tweaks was missing. I reinstalled the plugin, but it does not appear. What can I do?

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by ah-

The problem with that is that with the current method of loading the plugin it's not possible to get code executed automatically at boot. This would require finding another way to load the plugin, which requires be quite a bit of work.

Out of curiosity, how does it get loaded? I am familiar with embedded Linux development so get technical on me if that helps.

The plugin just seems to overwrite a shared library with one that has the tweaks, and which requires the Library setting to be selected to activate them. Rather than this, could you not also provide some extra logic in the boot script (/etc/init.d/rcS) or a script called at the end of the boot script to check to see if the plug-in is set to autostart, and if so backup and then overwrite the stock shared library with a tweaked shared library that doesn't require the library button being pressed?

[Rainer Zenz]

With the help from Jaden I solved my problem. As far as I can see the recent plugin version is no longer comatible with FW 1.9.16. Unfortunately.

I don't want to upgrade until the margin problem ist solved. But I'd like to use future options of this marvelous plugin.

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by Rainer Zenz

With the help from Jaden I solved my problem. As far as I can see the recent plugin version is no longer comatible with FW 1.9.16. Unfortunately.

I don't want to upgrade until the margin problem ist solved. But I'd like to use future options of this marvelous plugin.

Isn't there a version field in the ini file that would let you use it with 1.9.16?

Here you go:

; Global plugin settings
; compatFirmware specifies the firmware version with which the plugins is tested (0.0.0 disables the version check)
[Global]
#compatFirmware=0.0.0

[ah-]

Originally Posted by RoninTech

Isn't there a version field in the ini file that would let you use it with 1.9.16?

Here you go:

Either this or just install the last version from before the update. Nothing really changed since then.

Out of curiosity, how does it get loaded? I am familiar with embedded Linux development so get technical on me if that helps.

The plugin just seems to overwrite a shared library with one that has the tweaks, and which requires the Library setting to be selected to activate them. Rather than this, could you not also provide some extra logic in the boot script (/etc/init.d/rcS) or a script called at the end of the boot script to check to see if the plug-in is set to autostart, and if so backup and then overwrite the stock shared library with a tweaked shared library that doesn't require the library button being pressed?

There's no stock libtweaks.so, it doesn't overwrite any original files.

The main Kobo UI is called nickel, and is implemented with Qt embedded. It's basically one large, mostly monolithic C++ application. Nickel supports plugins for new filetypes, and usually a nickel plugin provides functionality to parse files and display them. This is for example used by the pdf viewer.
For this, each plugin provides a list of mimetypes that it can handle. When nickel needs to open a file for the first time, it looks for plugins (just shared libraries), loads them and calls the function to get the list of mimetypes. This is how the tweaks plugin is loaded at the moment. For even more details, look at the sourcecode at https://github.com/ah-/koboplugins/

It would be no problem to execute some random binary (installing a ssh server is pretty trivial), the problem is to execute code inside nickel.

Another option of getting code to run in nickel would be to fake a Qt plugin (http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/plugins-howto.html), as they are loaded earlier and require no user interaction. But I haven't looked into that yet. That would also require some code to detect when nickel is fully started, since at the moment I assume that when the plugin is loaded everything is already there and I can start patching things, but during startup that's not the case. This is also probably the reason why the plugin doesn't work with SD cards (just a theory, haven't tested that yet): With an SD card inserted, nickel wants to look at the files on the SD card during startup, and therefore loads the plugin earlier than without an SD card, the plugin doesn't find the stuff it wants to patch as it wasn't loaded yet and does nothing. Also note that nickel loads plugins only once, so since the plugin didn't fully load during startup it also doesn't work if one opens the library later.

[touring]

Originally Posted by PeterT

All the plugin does is to add some extra menu options,

Thanks PeterT, appreciated

Originally Posted by RoninTech

Definitely too busy to answer questions that are already answered in this very thread. Come on touring it'd only take you a few minutes to read through the thread.

@RoninTech I went to the website and searched there, thought it an obvious place to look, but absolutely nothing there about functionality. Also googled, and used forum search.

After all that I can't be assed spending an hour reading though 13 pages of mostly technical discussion to find out whether the plugin just might be interesting.

I would have thought it obvious that any new user might want this info FIRST rather than wading through incomprehensible technical talk??

Perhaps in a sticky at the beginning would be a logical place?

[Rainer Zenz]

Why not adding the following to Kobo-Tweaks, first paragraph?

Options for "Start" menu (hide/show):

• Favorites
• Library search
• Dictionary
• Reading Life
• Shop
• Sync
• Help
• Browser
• Airplane mode
• WiFi on/off
• Switch off
• Sleep mode

Miscellaneus:

• Hide Recommendations (startpage)
• Hide page numbers (reader)

Eperimental:

• Unlock bookshelves

LED colours:

• red, green or blue

Supported languages:

• English
• Deutsch
• Italiano
• ...

[Rainer Zenz]

Since I've downgraded the FW and installed the plugin again I was amazed that the booksheves I had installed, have survived.

There must be a separate file on the Kobo, that saves bookshelf informations (but I didn't find it). Could Calibre deal with that? Organizing bookshelves on the Kobo is a bit complicated.

[PeterT]

I think you will find that the shelving info is stored in the sqlite database on the Kobo.

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by touring

@RoninTech I went to the website and searched there, thought it an obvious place to look, but absolutely nothing there about functionality. Also googled, and used forum search.

After all that I can't be assed spending an hour reading though 13 pages of mostly technical discussion to find out whether the plugin just might be interesting.

Apologies touring, I should consider that different people read at different speeds. It only took me a few minutes to read the whole thing (and less than that to see what the plugin does).

[touring]

[QUOTE=Rainer Zenz;2015903]Why not adding the following to Kobo-Tweaks, first paragraph?/QUOTE]

Great idea!

Originally Posted by RoninTech

Apologies touring