Kobo Hebrew Support

[giladros]

I have a Kobo Glo and would love to be able to read Hebrew books on it. I tried downloading two attachments from this thread (UDHR and the Hebrew English Bible) and both do not appear correctly (I get symbols, not even Hebrew letters). I also tried downloading one of the free books on Mendele, changing the extension to .kepub.epub and still I get the same result. Any help would be very much appreciated.

I see that in particular DNSB has succeeded in viewing Hebrew books correctly on a Kobo Glo. If you could please attach the epub you used for those screenshots, that would be a very helpful first step.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by giladros

I see that in particular DNSB has succeeded in viewing Hebrew books correctly on a Kobo Glo. If you could please attach the epub you used for those screenshots, that would be a very helpful first step.

Change the extension of this RTL test ePub3 book to kepub.epub and test it on your Kobo.

If it works, you might have to convert your Hebrew ePubs to the ePub3 format before you change the extension to kepub ePub. You also might have to embed Hebrew fonts.
(There's a Sigil ePub3 output plugin that'll automatically convert valid epub2 books to epub3 books. You can download Sigil here.)

[Ken Maltby]

The "RTLTest2.epub" works fine in KOReader, just as it is. You have to have left KOReader set to use "embedded styles", but that is normally the default. As far as I can tell it looks like all the tests are working.

Luck;
Ken

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

The "RTLTest2.epub" works fine in KOReader, just as it is.

Thanks for testing. Are you sure that the Kobo version of KOReader supports RTL text? (The Kindle version doesn't.)

BTW, I attached a screenshot of the Hebrew text. Note that the last word "הארץ" should be displayed on the left side. I.e. if the left-most character isn't a "ץ" KOReader doesn't support RTL text.

[Ken Maltby]

You could be right I don't read either language. Here is a screenshot (reduced to below the MR guidelines):



Luck;
Ken

[oren64]

Hebrew books Works fine on my Glo.

I don't now why .kepub.epub extension didn't for you.
Is the book show as "KOBO EPUB" in library?

On Epub you need to use Hebrew fonts, copy the font to the device X:\fonts, search in google for "Hebrew fonts".

EDIT:@Ken:the text it not correct RTL, Doitsu show the correct text.

[Ken Maltby]

I notice though that the text in the "rtl.xhtml" is:
<p class="hebrew" dir="rtl" xml:lang="iw">בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ</p>

and, if I remove the "dir="rtl"" then it appears as:

(the cut and paste of the following has the rest of this post working rtl, so I'll leave it here.)

בְּרֵאשִׁ֖ית בָּרָ֣א אֱלֹהִ֑ים אֵ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם וְאֵ֥ת הָאָֽרֶץ

[Ken Maltby]

Well removing it worked in Sigil, but not in KOReader. So not yet fixed in KOReader, I'm pretty sure it has come up at the project at Github.

Luck;
Ken

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by giladros

I have a Kobo Glo and would love to be able to read Hebrew books on it. I tried downloading two attachments from this thread (UDHR and the Hebrew English Bible) and both do not appear correctly (I get symbols, not even Hebrew letters). I also tried downloading one of the free books on Mendele, changing the extension to .kepub.epub and still I get the same result. Any help would be very much appreciated.

I see that in particular DNSB has succeeded in viewing Hebrew books correctly on a Kobo Glo. If you could please attach the epub you used for those screenshots, that would be a very helpful first step.

Attached is a screenshot of what I see when I simply copy the attachment in post #1 (ArieBaalGoof-test1.5.epub) to my Glo, without changing the filename or anything else. (i.e. this is the ordinary ePub reader, not the KePub reader.)

If you see empty squares in the book then it means the font you have selected doesn't have Hebrew glyphs, so just use the Aa menu to select one that does. If the book has an embedded font then you might need to select "Publisher Default" to see it, depending on how the publisher has done the stylesheet.

(Edit: Another possible reason for seeing empty squares is if the publisher has used the wrong text encoding for the book. This sometimes shows up in English books as blank squares or wrong glyphs used for speech marks and other punctuation.)

If you see empty squares for the book title in the library, it means the fonts loaded by default when the device boots don't have Hebrew glyphs, but once you open a book and select a font for reading the necessary fonts will be loaded and the library will display Hebrew titles thereafter, until the next time you reboot the device.

Edit: This is with the current firmware version 3.19.5761. There was a major update to the ePub reader in firmware version 3.5.0 (July 2014), so if you use firmware older than that then it will be different. This thread is very old, and the early posts will be talking about very old firmware.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by giladros

I tried downloading two attachments from this thread (UDHR and the Hebrew English Bible) and both do not appear correctly (I get symbols, not even Hebrew letters).

Here is a screenshot of the book attached to post #14. I simply copied it to my Glo (fw 3.19.5761) without any changes (so the file extension .kepub.epub causes it it be viewed with the KePub reader, even though it is not a real KePub.)

Edit: If you don't see the Hebrew characters in this book then I think the problem is with the font you have selected. (The screenshot below is with the Linux Libertine font selected.) The book in the previous post had an embedded font, this one doesn't.

[giladros]

GeoffR: I have now added Hebrew fonts to my Kobo by copying the files to the fonts directory. This caused the test files from before to appear correctly in Hebrew RTL, so I guesss that this is the key step. I tried the attachment you provided (ArieBaalGoof-test1.5.epub), which indeed appears correctly.

Then I tried downloading another sample file from Mendele, which at first didn't appear right justified with the extension .kepub.epub, but when I changed it back to .epub it appeared fine. What's the best general procedure for ebooks in Hebrew? It sounds like some ebooks have embedded fonts and some don't, so I guess this complicates things.

Another point, more minor: is there a way to be able to page forward by touching the left side of the screen for Hebrew ebooks? It seems more natural than paging forward on the right side.

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by giladros

GeoffR: I have now added Hebrew fonts to my Kobo by copying the files to the fonts directory. This caused the test files from before to appear correctly in Hebrew RTL, so I guesss that this is the key step. I tried the attachment you provided (ArieBaalGoof-test1.5.epub), which indeed appears correctly.

Then I tried downloading another sample file from Mendele, which at first didn't appear right justified with the extension .kepub.epub, but when I changed it back to .epub it appeared fine. What's the best general procedure for ebooks in Hebrew? It sounds like some ebooks have embedded fonts and some don't, so I guess this complicates things.

I don't read Hebrew (or any language other than English) so someone else can probably give you better advice.

My guess is that some books were created to work on devices that had limited support for RTL languages, and some of the tricks they used then cause problems on devices which do support RTL. The RTL support in the KePub reader is probably better than in the ePub reader, but some books might still work better on the ePub reader for that reason.

Edit: The KePub reader handles fonts quite differently from the ePub reader, I don't really understand much about how they work, but it seems that the KePub reader has the ability to select glyphs from another font if they are missing from the current font, while with the ePub reader you (or the publisher) need to select a font that has the necessary glyphs.

Another point, more minor: is there a way to be able to page forward by touching the left side of the screen for Hebrew ebooks? It seems more natural than paging forward on the right side.

In Settings > Reading settings there is an option to change the tap zones.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by giladros

Another point, more minor: is there a way to be able to page forward by touching the left side of the screen for Hebrew ebooks? It seems more natural than paging forward on the right side.

As well as the tap zones, you can specify the page turning direction in the books. This is done on the spine in the OPF. The example I have is

<spine page-progression-direction="rtl">

From my testing just now, the book has to be a kepub. This affect both the tap and the swipe. And it seems very strange to turn the page by swiping left to right and have the page number go up.

[yevgeny.bezman]

Attached are screenshots of the three books posted in this thread.

I'm using the Tinos font, which is freely available online. All epubs are renamed to .kepub.epub before sending to my Kobo Aura HD.

Also attached is one screenshot of the TOC of the "Around the World in 28 Languages" book.

http://imgur.com/a/NGFfb

[giladros]

Thanks everyone, that was very helpful, I think I have it down now.