nicoverbruggen/kobalt v1.0-beta.3

Kobalt v1.0-beta.3

on GitHub

What's changed

• Improved opening of EPUBs with imperfect markup and unsupported layout features, including books that use Adobe page templates.

• Added Hide non-linear fragments in Settings > Advanced. It skips optional EPUB sections during normal page turns while keeping them available through links, Chapters and page-number navigation. It is off by default.

• Increased the maximum text size from 20 pt to 48 pt and the maximum Thickness from +8 to +12.

• Fixed excessive view redrawing throughout Kobalt, which in practice means you see the screen flash less frequently.

• Opening the font and layout panels is now significantly faster.

• Renamed Bionic Reading to Bold Reading. Upgrades from Beta 2 keep its saved setting. The checkbox now applies immediately. Failed settings saves show a disk write error dialog and keep the previous setting.

• Save changed reading progress to Nickel every 30 seconds while reading and before sleep, so the sleep screen can show the current progress.

• Save reading progress before the USB connection becomes available, while preserving newer synced progress and allowing USB to continue if saving fails.

• Fixed native progress and sleep-cover updates for KEPUB pages without source element IDs or with normalized text. Nickel receives the start of the current chapter when the exact position cannot be mapped; Kobalt keeps the exact position locally.

• Fixed opening and bookmarking DRM-free books downloaded through compatible sync servers that use numeric or other non-UUID book IDs. Existing bookmark folders remain available.

• Stats now uses shared cached word counts on Kobo and Android, including plain EPUBs. Counts cover the whole book and chapter intervals, survive reflow and reuse the parsed-document cache. Chapters uses the EPUB table of contents without Nickel's word-count API.

• Added Automatic brightness for Kobo devices with an ambient light sensor. Manual brightness adjustments turn it off and stop a pending brightness animation from overwriting the chosen level. Cancelled gestures restore the original level and setting.

• Kobo devices with an orientation sensor now offer Portrait, Landscape and Both. Portrait lock is the default, and rejected orientations no longer trigger page layout changes. Devices without a sensor keep manual rotation.

• Added support for the Kobo Touch's physical Home button. Pressing it saves reading progress and returns to Nickel's Home screen.

• Page buttons now page Chapters, Bookmarks, search results and licenses instead of being ignored.

• Sideloaded fonts in folders up to two levels below fonts/, such as fonts/Family/static/, now appear in the font picker. Hidden files and Kobo's wrapped fonts are skipped.

• Publisher Fonts uses Libron for serif, Legible Next for sans-serif and IBM Plex Mono for monospace when the book has no embedded fonts. The default reading font remains a separate book override.

• Added hyphenation dictionaries for Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, Slovenian and Ukrainian.

• Show formatting warnings only for confirmed unsupported layout features. Large books no longer show a warning when the formatting inspection reaches its limits.

• Show the book-loading screen at 0% in Kobalt's interface fonts, before publication inspection and full asset validation. This makes Kobalt feel faster to start and feels less like it's frozen.

• Long chapters in the Stats chart fill the chart height without a visible line through the bars when chapters are very long relative to other chapters.

Installation

Download the package for your Kobo firmware:

• Kobalt-qt5.zip for firmware 4.38 and later.
• Kobalt-qt6.zip for firmware 5.18 and later 5.x, and 6.x.

Manual instructions

1. Connect your Kobo over USB and extract the ZIP on your computer. Show hidden files to see .adds and .kobo.
2. Copy .adds to the root of the Kobo drive. Merge folders and replace matching package files. Keep other apps, settings and reading data.
3. Then copy .kobo to the same drive root, merging folders again.
4. Eject the Kobo safely, disconnect USB and let the update install.

Copy both folders in that order. Leave the .tgz file inside .kobo compressed.

Checksums · Build information

Source code and dependencies