Koreader running on Kobos (all of them, hopefully!)

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

As to tips for how to make koreader work better, I find that making it so that Nickel has the least possible function and giving it no files to manage (except the launching .pngs), to avoid a lot of hassles and its excessive processing delays. I have my ebook files in folders inside a hidden folder. Nickel will not process them at all. Both Giorgio's port of Koreader and Sergey's port of CoolReader allow you to select and read the ebooks in hidden folders. I have both on my AuraHD but almost exclusively use Koreader. The main reason may be that I have already worked out how to tweak Koreader better.

Play with the options in both top and bottom menus, rendering styles, fonts, ect...
You will be surprised how much is already there.

Luck;
Ken

My OCD will get worse if I try to play with the options, considering my complete ignorance in the field . I planned to learn some linux two years ago but...

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

You just poke the screen outside the menu.

You can navigate to the whole internal uSD, but File Manager is only setup to view certain files (ebooks and .txt for the most part). It is possible to add file types but it is a reader program not a real file manager.

Luck;
Ken

I just did. It brought me to this page:

../
Consolekit/
firmware/
gettext/
gio/
modules/
ts/
udev/

I tried each of them. The first one takes me to the longer list of directories. None of the rest leads to book folders. By clicking "FileManager", I get back to the "history + toggle" page. Poking the blank space on the page won't help either.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by jshzh

I just did. It brought me to this page:

../
Consolekit/
firmware/
gettext/
gio/
modules/
ts/
udev/

I tried each of them. The first one takes me to the longer list of directories. None of the rest leads to book folders. By clicking "FileManager", I get back to the "history + toggle" page. Poking the blank space on the page won't help either.

It looks like you navigated to "lib/".

Your books are most likely at: mnt/onboard. Poke "mnt/" then poke "onboard/".

Luck;
Ken

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

You just poke the screen outside the menu.

You can navigate to the whole internal uSD, but File Manager is only setup to view certain files (ebooks and .txt for the most part). It is possible to add file types but it is a reader program not a real file manager.

It looks like PeterT is saying they are in mnt/onboard/.kobo/articles. mnt/onboard is the FAT partition of the internal uSD card that you see when you use the USB cable,. mnt/sd gets you to the external uSD card, if you have one pluged in.


Luck;
Ken

Understood now. In fact, what Peter saw was where the files were stored under Koreader system - not actually read the articles in Koreader. In that case, the Kobo software is still needed to read Pocket articles.

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

It looks like you navigated to "lib/".

Your books are most likely at: mnt/onboard

Luck;
Ken

Thanks a lot. Found them just as you said!

[tshering]

Originally Posted by jshzh

Do you mean backup the firmware?

I mean the complete internal sd. The important part is the recovery partition.

Originally Posted by jshzh

I don't have important material on the reader. So the worst scenario is to bring back the factory setting, right?

Generally speaking, I would assume so. But paola reported that it was impossible to trigger a factory reset on her mini, after things got somehow messed up (I don't know whether my package caused this or it was kind of coincidence). This is why I recommended you make a back up image of your internal sd.

Originally Posted by jshzh

If I may not able to do that (my last resource), I am not going to install the menu tool because it will be beyond my capabilities

As I learned from some posts in this forum, opening the Aura HD without causing some damage is not an easy job. So I understand that your would like to avoid this, and not installing the menu tool might be a wise decision. If you take the risk nonetheless and things go really bad, you can alwasy ask in this forum whether somebody shares his Aura HD image with you. Ken Maltby, for instance, shared his image already once. However, I don't want to talk you into anything.

[tshering]

Originally Posted by jshzh

Yes, Sir. There are three attachments to this post: the first title is in Cyrillic, second traditional Chinese, last simplified Chinese. They all appear as "????" in "History" but completely normal in "FileManager".

One more thing for your reference: if I click a correctly displayed title in "History", I can open the book while if I click the ???? titles, I am taken back to the Kobo interface.

The books are in public domain.

The titles of your files are displayed mostly by ??? in my web browser and I cannot download them with the original file name. Therefore I downloaded one of these books from another side and put it into a zip file (I removed most of the books content to keep the filesize small)

[lohtse]

no matter what I do when installing this on my Touch it never works...Always the same...when opening the app the screen LOCKS... By this I mean that there is no response from the screen when touching it...Nor is there a response from the Home button and indeed by using the power button to simple switch of(sleep mode)... only way to resolve is to hold power for 10-15secs and then reboot...

has anyone else had these issues?

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by tshering

The titles of your files are displayed mostly by ??? in my web browser and I cannot download them with the original file name. Therefore I downloaded one of these books from another side and put it into a zip file (I removed most of the books content to keep the filesize small)

Thank you. I also noticed that all the three titles - when uploaded - show as ???? on my screen. I don't know what is wrong as I have never had problems seeing the titles and reading the contents on my computer. They are properly displayed in my Pocket 602 as well. I uploaded them not from Kobo - if that matters - but directly from my computer. Let me try to upload the file you put in the zip file. I doubt that will make any difference.

No it doesn't work. I will have to open another post to upload an RAR file with all the three titles in it.

[jshzh]

The attachment contains 3 books with non-English titles that show up as ???? in "History" in Koreader. Uploaded as a package for proper downloading. Sorry for the size.

Thank you for your investigation.

[Ken Maltby]

Not really a fix to the font rendering issue, but If you can read the file name on your PC, couldn't you change the filename to a translation that uses a character set other than the one causing problems?

Luck;
Ken

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

Not really a fix to the font rendering issue, but If you can read the file name on your PC, couldn't you change the filename to a translation that uses a character set other than the one causing problems?

Luck;
Ken

Yes, that could be a temporary solution for one or two books. My 32G card in Pocketbook 602 is almost full - surely a sign of greed - approximately 60% are in Chinese and Russian. Plus, translation of some titles will be very difficult. Pinyin (a type of romanization of Chinese) or transliteration of Russian could be an alternative solution. But romanization doesn't include any "tones" (unless in printed elementary schoolbooks), even with tones, one "word" in letters always refers to many characters with different meanings. It may take a lot of guess work to figure out the meaning. Transliteration of Cyrillic is easy to recognize but it also takes more brain processing (reading out in mind) instead of converting the image of a word into meaning.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by jshzh

Yes, that could be a temporary solution for one or two books. My 32G card in Pocketbook 602 is almost full - surely a sign of greed - approximately 60% are in Chinese and Russian. Plus, translation of some titles will be very difficult. Pinyin (a type of romanization of Chinese) or transliteration of Russian could be an alternative solution. But romanization doesn't include any "tones" (unless in printed elementary schoolbooks), even with tones, one "word" in letters always refers to many characters with different meanings. It may take a lot of guess work to figure out the meaning. Transliteration of Cyrillic is easy to recognize but it also takes more brain processing (reading out in mind) instead of converting the image of a word into meaning.

I meant only for the file name.

Luck;
Ken

[jshzh]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

I meant only for the file name.

Luck;
Ken

I meant the same :-) I tried that before Pocketbook 602 had full support for Chinese titles (or before I figured out how it worked). It was a pain to read the romanized titles. No doubt about that. In addition to the above mentioned reasons, Chinese titles usually become at least twice longer in translation or romanization.

[PeterT]

I wonder if the issue for ????'s in the file names is related to how the file system has been mounted?

mount -t vfat -o noatime,nodiratime,shortname=mixed,utf8 /dev/mmcblk0p3 /mnt/onboard

From what I read I wonder if it would also need this switch:

uni_xlate

Translate unhandled Unicode characters to special escaped sequences. This lets you backup and restore filenames that are created with any Unicode characters. Without this option, a '?' is used when no translation is possible. The escape character is ':' because it is otherwise illegal on the vfat filesystem. The escape sequence that gets used, where u is the unicode character, is: ':', (u & 0x3f), ((u>>6) & 0x3f), (u>>12).