Aura HD new to aura hd.. (annotation/fixed width fonts)

[kbahd260]

hi people of the world (sorry for my english)
i am new to this forum and i just bought couple of weeks ago an Aura HD (my first ereader)
i haven't patched it or done any mod or tuned anything yet..
my software version (firmware ?) is: 2.5.0 (4/9/13).

my impressions;
i am pleased with the build quality and the size and the definition of the screen and the backlight feature, battery life (which is still at 93%)..

But,
i am very disappointed with the kobo original reader, taking annotation with a capacitative screen lack the precision and makes the operation very sluggish not to mention that it is very slow (wonder if all the reader are this slow), i also experienced the very annoying bug of "not being able to take annotation inside chapter of kepub files".., also experienced some freezings with nickel..

because for me, taking annotations, exporting annotations, and maybe syncing annotations are very decisive features. (i was going to buy a sony prs 1 with resistive + stylus, but its not available in my country)..

my question:
1: are there other readers available that have good annotations feature ?
haven't tried (coolreader and koreader)

so please feel free to give me advice that will help me make annotations a seamless feature in my reading experience.. i dont care for other fancy stuff or going trough with converting ebooks as long as i am able to take annotations and export them..

2: i also need very bad to be able to use monospaced fonts (fixed width) since i need to read schematics drawn with ascii art..
is there a converting trick (txt>pdf?) that could could help keeping monospaced fonts or isthere any other way ?

thanks

[meeera]

Originally Posted by kbahd260

2: i also need very bad to be able to use monospaced fonts (fixed width) since i need to read schematics drawn with ascii art..
is there a converting trick (txt>pdf?) that could could help keeping monospaced fonts or isthere any other way ?

I haven't tested this with a monospaced font, but have you tried simply sideloading a monospaced font?

- Plug your Kobo in to your computer, and Connect.
- Create a folder at the root of your Kobo, and call it

fonts

(exactly that, no capital, no other changes)

- Drag and drop your font in there,
- safely eject the Kobo from your computer,
- then reboot the Kobo (not just sleep/unsleep: a full turn off with a long hold of the power slide button).

[kbahd260]

hi thank you for your answer
i added "dark courier.ttf" renamed it "dark.ttf" but unfortunately with both names once i try to list the font in kobo reader it freezes and reboots automatically

i suppressed dark.ttf kept the folder "\fonts" empty the list works again as before..
learned (sideloading is actually putting manually stuff on the internal memory)

[meeera]

Originally Posted by kbahd260

hi thank you for your answer
i added "dark courier.ttf" renamed it "dark.ttf" but unfortunately with both names once i try to list the font in kobo reader it freezes and reboots automatically

i suppressed dark.ttf kept the folder "\fonts" empty the list works again as before..
learned (sideloading is actually putting manually stuff on the internal memory)

Have a poke back through the font threads in the Kobo forums: you MUST have the font named exactly correctly for it to work.

[davidfor]

For sideloading fonts have a look at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=204363. The first post includes instructions on how to do it.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by kbahd260

hi thank you for your answer
i added "dark courier.ttf" renamed it "dark.ttf" but unfortunately with both names once i try to list the font in kobo reader it freezes and reboots automatically

i suppressed dark.ttf kept the folder "\fonts" empty the list works again as before..
learned (sideloading is actually putting manually stuff on the internal memory)

When I wanted a monospaced font, I used the Dark Courier font I downloaded from HP's site (lj611en.exe). I had to rename the 4 fonts files that were extracted. The internal font name was Dark Courier so I renamed the 4 font files as follows:

dour45w.ttf => Dark Courier-Regular.ttf
dour46w.ttf => Dark Courier-Italic.ttf
dour65w.ttf => Dark Courier-Bold.ttf
dour66w.ttf => Dark Courier-BoldItalic.ttf


After added those files to the fonts folder on my Kobo and power cycling the Kobo, I was able to use those fonts to display computer/teletype style text.


And yes, resetting or power cycling after adding a font is necessary unless you are very fond of "interesting results".

Regards,
David

[kbahd260]

thank you guys for your answers
thank you DNSB i could successfully install and use dark courier

but i still have a problem..

the schematics in ascii art are still not good.. all messed up

1: left justification is used no matter what option i choose..(off center etc)
2: and also a lot off characters are replaced with question marks "???"
3: justification is suppressing any blank space that is preceding other characters.

and since all the document relies on preceding "spaces" to create margins..
so it's messing all the document..

is there nay way to replace spaces with other special characters (in hex editor maybe ? since it's a .txt)

[PeterT]

You'd be best to change those txt files into ePubs; take some time, do a good job and it will be far more pleasing.

99.999% of Kobo users don't read txt files!

[davidfor]

I think the problem is the multiple space are being displayed as a single space. Converting them to epub would only fix this if the conversion replaced the extra spaces with   or the equivalent character. Replacing the space with the appropriate unicode character in the text file might work.

[kbahd260]

thx guys for the answers

findings:
* epub's conversion messes dark courier's implementation, it's not anymore monospaced or even the same font..
* inserting a non ascii character through HEX editor makes it no longer treated as TXT and dark courier (monospace) is lost.

i tried inserting a '*' at the start of every line (notepad++ rows mode) but didn't work,
thx davidfor for the hint on merged spaced you were right i made several test to find that,
more than two spaces are merged into one (no matter their position in the text),

so,
i replaced every 2 spaces ( ) with (` ) special ascii caracter decimal code 60 AND 1 space.. (notepad++ replacing function)
it looks now perfectly aligned i am satisfied with how it looks even if it looks rainy

//////

still got some "???" caracters i would like to know if there are more tested monospaced/fixed width font on the kobo
i will be AFK please feel free to answer thx in advance..

[jackie_w]

re: the ??? characters. Dark Courier may not have very good coverage of many of those ascii-art unicode characters. Try a few more Mono fonts to see if you can find a better one. DroidSansMono and LiberationMono both have more glyphs than DarkCourier, but whether they are the glyphs you need, I don't know.

[kbahd260]

ProFontWindows 278
M+ 1m 1686
Anonymous Pro 623
Liberation Mono 663
Luxi Mono 395
cousine 211
Bitstream Vera Sans Mono 269
lekton 950
Anonymous 220
saxMono 492
Droid Sans Mono 612
Dark courier 385
Courier 178
Courier New 1318
DejaVu Sans Mono 3310
Fixedsys Excelsior 3.01 5993
Everson Mono 9314

a list of monospaced fixed width fonts with Glyphs count,
i tried fonts with good counts:
courier new is too thin, droid is clean,i suspect that lekton isn't fully monospace.. other fonts are just weird looking or too fat.. tried also M+ and everson are not recognized as monospaced..

renamed as follow in the "\fonts" directory:
Courier New-Regular.ttf
Droid Sans Mono-Regular.ttf
M+ 1m-Regular.ttf
DejaVu Sans Mono-Book.ttf
Everson Mono-Regular.ttf
Fixedsys Excelsior 3.01-Regular.ttf

i like DejaVu

///

finally i could get rid of the "????" by saving the TXT as unicode rather than ANSI
thank you

[kbahd260]

these operations are required to be done if you wanna read specially formatted (79 characters wide articles) gamefaqs.com game's walktroughs on kobo aura hd..

1: use monospaced fonts (ex:dejavu sans mono)

2: insert a row of asterisks in the first leftmost position in all documents. (insert row function notepad++)

3: replace all two concatenated spaces ( ) with (` ) through all the document in order to do it you must run the operation twice or thrice (replace function notepad++)

4: save the document in unicode not in ANSI..