Touch Kobo Touch future firmware feature request thread

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by robko

Probably not (and updating the screen would only need to happen once per minute), but you could run into ghosting/legibility issues fairly quickly.

Cool. I can't see ghosting being an issue for something that changes once a minute since it's a small screen and our page turns would clear the screen. Unless someone reads REEEAAAAL slow and then sleep would kick in anyway.

Originally Posted by robko

The other part of the power use equation is that it would have to keep the processor live in a more highly powered up state to know when it needed to change the time. I believe Kobo talked about these points waaayyyyy back when at one point.

Do screen touches to change pages, enter menus etc. not require the processor to do stuff? I would guess that handling real time clock events once a minute wouldn't be a big deal, power wise.

[TechniSol]

It seems likely that the neonode IR hardware is left powered up, or at least the IR LEDs are active(though perhaps pulsed -I've never read the neonode spec sheet), that the processor drops into a low power sleep mode in between page changes, and an IRQ or NMI is whacked by the neonode hardware to bring the processor out of sleep when a "touch" event is logged. Most microcontrollers also allow for a timed sleep mode where an internal timer counter is allowed to remain powered and clocked until it causes a wakeup by whacking an IRQ internally connected to the timer/counter hardware. That would normally be how you'd handle the wake up to write the screen on a once a minute basis, unless you have an external RTC to whack an interrupt.

[zztush]

I'd really like to see that kobo stays on the last page itself when sleep. It may be bit faster to return to read and may be less consumption of battery.

As I often solve puzles on my kobo, it is very good for me to solve puzles when sleep mode.

I think that the concept of the sleep screen of book cover comes from paper books. But it is only the physical reason of paper books.

[Wendy]

The last software update is the buggiest yet. I have never had any problems with my Kobo (had it for a little over a year) but now there's a bug where the wrong cover is shown, it doesn't remember the page I was on when I closed the book, there is no more home/library button on the screen - I have to navigate by first pressing the physical home button and then click around until I get to where I was.

I'm still missing the little black lines on the bottom that indicate how long chapters are and I don't understand why that was taken away.

Additionally, now the pages load slower (!) and whenever there's a full page refresh, some lines of text are loaded faster, some stay blank a second longer. It's incredibly annoying.

I can't wait for the next update. The way my Kobo Touch works now, it can only get better.

[julandroid]

Kobo supports UTF-8, so you can read books in different languages. What it doesn't is searching by anything different than (extended) LATIN.

If I read text in Cyrillic (Bulgarian, Russian) there is no way to search by Cyrillic term, by typing them, via the virtual keyboard.

Please add keyboard layouts to the virtual keyboard and let me choose Bulgarian/Cyrillic from the settings menu.

Personally I own Kobo Glo, but since both Glo and Touch use virtual keyboard, the feature is the same and many international users (like me) will benefit from it!

In worst case - please allow putting some xml/txt/ini file, somewhere on the SD card (let say in /languages/) which will be used as virtual keyboard definition file, which will remap the extended LATIN keyboard layout. That's way even, no changes in the GUI will be required to enable extra keyboard languages.

[sunny1z]

I would like to have a dutch Hyphenation file included in the Kobo

[jgoguen]

I'd like to see better EPUB3 support, particularly the ability to read series title/index from the packaging file (see http://idpf.org/epub/30/spec/epub30-...itles-examples). It would be a nice way to set series data for sideloaded books and could be used the same way whenever Kobo starts pushing out EPUB3 books.

Bonus points if it also reads these tags from an EPUB2 packaging file

[Anak]

Originally Posted by sunny1z

I would like to have a dutch Hyphenation file included in the Kobo

Also, RMSDK only supplies hyphenation dictionaries for English, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish. Customers may add their own hyphenation dictionaries for other languages. Hyphenation dictionaries are in the same format as the ones used in OpenOffice. Customers need to be aware that many of the non-Adobe hyphenation dictionaries available might support only a subset of the required functionalities. (Source: Datalogics [S-11417])

So it's possible to add your own hyphenation files quite easily. If, Kobo tells

• in which directory the files should be placed
• the naming conventions of hyphenation files

I assume that RMSDK already checks for the correct hyphenation files depending on the language of the opened book.

[geormes]

I would like a firmware update that is clean enough I could update from 1.9.17 without fear.

[Lucas Malor]

My suggestions are about Kobo Glo, that I originally written here (I hope this is the right thread):

1. show last opened page when you power it on. The same when it sleeps and powers off.
2. an app that let you write text files.
3. the ability to resize font using two fingers, as you can do with many touch tablets.
4. currently you must wait 1 - 1.5 seconds before some operations will be performed, like accessing to dictionary and turn on/off the device. It should be nice if those delays could be personalized, since they are too long for me.

[Lucas Malor]

Another thing: do Kobo developers have taken into consideration to adopt Calibre? I think it's more simple to do a modified version of Calibre instead of maintaining a slow and less powerful software.

[Anak]

Originally Posted by Lucas Malor

Another thing: do Kobo developers have taken into consideration to adopt Calibre? I think it's more simple to do a modified version of Calibre instead of maintaining a slow and less powerful software.

Calibre does not comply to the IPDF epub standard, so Kobo has to stick to a rendering engine that does this. And those rending engines have their limitations, bugs etc.
Kobo can better ask their rendering engine supplier to support - unofficially or undocumented - some other CSS/HTML5 features that are really missed right now in epub 2 en 3pub (e.g. real small-caps).

It relatively easy to implement additional official HTML5 features to the rendering engine. The engine supplier can inventarize under its customers which features should be added to improve the look and feel of digital reading.

But yes, Calibre can do things differently, do more and maybe even better.

[Lucas Malor]

Well, I spoke about Kobo Desktop, not the internal rendering engine

I noticed some other little problems:

1. add a button that changes to "text mode" (currently you can access it holding a word for a while)
2. add a "select" button in "text mode", a tool that allow you to choose the start of a text selection with the first click and the end with an hold. It's useful if you want to select many rows and text on different pages too
3. if you change the orientation rotating the document by 90°, to return to the previous orientation you must click the rotate button other 3 times. I think it's more useful to have a rotate button that simply toggles between landscape / portrait orientations
4. if the orientation is landscape only the document aspect will be changed, so you'll have menus at the left and right of the screen and you must click over the top of the screen to turn page. It would be better if the entire GUI would change orientation
5. you can't change orientation in a epub document, so if you have images in the document you can't see them in landscape mode

[Peakcrew]

Originally Posted by Lucas Malor

[*] if you change the orientation rotating the document by 90°, to return to the previous orientation you must click the rotate button other 3 times. I think it's more useful to have a rotate button that simply toggles between landscape / portrait orientations

I used to have this on a JetBook - it was really irritating because the landscape and portrait positions often meant that the reader was in the wrong orientation (e.g. power socket at the wrong side for where the cable came from making it difficult to read and charge at the same time). I'd much rather have the choice, though the ability to rotate anti/clockwise would be nice.

[readandread]

Originally Posted by tshering

In case somebody is still interested in this question. This is one way to export annotations/highlights from KT to a text file. From the description it might seem a little tiresome, but as soon as you did the preparing steps once, the usage is very easy.

Download the sqlite3 programm from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html and unzip it into C:\kobotest\.

Create a file "work.bat" with the following content:
(begin of content)
sqlite3 KoboReader.sqlite < extr_annotations.txt
(end of content)

Create another file "extr_annotations.txt" with the following content:
(begin of content)
.output annotations.txt
SELECT Text, Annotation
FROM Bookmark
WHERE VolumeID LIKE "%%pg37873-images.epub";
.exit
(end of content)

Do not type "(begin of content)" and "(end of content)". I put them here just for clarification. Replace "pg37873-images.epub" with the filename of the epub you want to extract the annotations from.

Connect the KT to the computer and copy the file "KoboReader.sqlite" from KT (e.g. "G:\.kobo\KoboReader.sqlite", in my case) to "C:\kobotest\".

In "C:\kobotest\", there should now be the following files:
sqlite3.exe
KoboReader.sqlite
work.bat
extr_annotations.txt

Double click on "work.bat". After some split seconds you will find in the same folder a file named "annotations.txt". Open it with MSWord or WordPad. The Editor does not show the file nicely. The text file is encoded in utf8, so you can use it for instance for Chinese and Japanese too.

Can you post a link to the result file extr_annotations.txt or post how the file looks like?