plato on the kobo libra 2

When you first get the device, you can plug it into your computer and mount it directly, everything is just owned by root:

$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:48   0 232.9G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:49   0   550M  0 part /boot
├─sda2   8:50   0   225G  0 part /nix/store
│                                /
└─sdd3   8:51   0     4G  0 part [SWAP]
sdb      8:144  1  28.5G  0 disk

$ sudo mount /dev/sdj ~/kobo

To bypass the kobo account setup, you can exit the database on the device:

$ sudo sqlite3 ~/kobo/.kobo/KoboReader.sqlite
sqlite> INSERT INTO user(UserID,UserKey) VALUES('1','');
sqlite> .quit

Now let’s install plato. Current releases can be found at the OP of this kobo forum post. The release is just a zip file that we will extract to ~/kobo. “installing” just means coping the contents of the release onto the reader:

sudo unzip OCP-Plato-0.9.38.zip -d ~/kobo

After you unmount, there will be a Plato launch icon at the bottom of the screen - but you’ll likely want to do some setup (see below)

Reader settings I have that differ from the default (the Georgia font just looks “right” to me for reading):

[reader]
south-strip = "next-page"
font-path = "/mnt/onboard/.adds/plato/fonts"
font-family = "Georgia"
margin-width = 10
max-margin-width = 20
line-height = 1.1
ignore-document-css = true

[reader.paragraph-breaker]
stretch-tolerance = 1.5

The most opinionated setting in here is setting ignore-document-css to true. This means I have a consistent reading experience for books that are simply plain text, but if epubs rely on something more fancy for effect (or for example if I am reading a screenplay) I will turn this off. Overall though, having this setting on and crushing the exceptions has been worth the consistent experience for me.

To install a dictionary, grab a zip from here and unzip it to ~/kobo/.adds/plato/dictionaries. You can long tap a word while reading to look it up while reading.

I add font files to the ~/kobo/.adds/plato/fonts dir, and then make them accessible with this option in Settings.toml:

font-path = "/mnt/onboard/.adds/plato/fonts"

Create ~/kobo/.adds/plato/css/epub-user.css, and add:

p {
    text-align: justify;
    margin: 1em 0 0 0 !important;
}

p + p {
    text-indent: 1em;
    margin: 0 !important;
}

img { /* for centering */
    margin: auto;
}

For a db located in ~/kobo/library, set path like so:

[[libraries]]
path = "/mnt/onboard/library"
# ...

If there are any issues with Settings.toml, the default settings are used and the config error is logged to an info.log file in the same directory.

Note that even if you have firmware updates turned off, if you are connected to the wifi, kobo can still auto-update and break plato for you. Your files will still be there, you’ll just have to copy the plato release over to then device again.