Custom fonts for subtitles issue

Hi,

I have SSA subtitles (*.ass) with custom fonts that I have as well. I moved them to /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts . So kodi sees these new fonts and I can change default font under "Language --> Subtitle --> Font to use for text subtitles". What I'm trying to achieve is actually to see all these fonts while watching a movie like it's defined in *.ass file when different lines can have different fonts.

Does anybody know how to make it work?

Okay, after spending a day playing with this I was able to find interesting Kodi's behavior. For *.ass fonts Kodi actually looks into /usr/share/fonts/ . I'm guessing some library checks this path. Seems like this thing which renders subtitles completely ignores "/storage/.kodi/media/Fonts" and I can't upload custom fonts to "/usr/share/fonts/" because it's read only by default. Trying to find a way to make it open "/storage/.kodi/media/Fonts", will appreciate any help.

vpeter, ah, completely forgot about mount --bind, but YEAP! It works! The theory is confirmed now. Thanks!

This is how it looks like before any change: Shared album - Stas Rudenko (rooty0) - Google Photos .

And the result after the binding custom fonts to /usr/share/fonts: Shared album - Stas Rudenko (rooty0) - Google Photos

P.s. I also have following files at /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts which where created for the fonts: fonts.dir , fonts.scale

So this is interesting, actually it is related to Xorg . Would be cool to have custom xorg config at /storage/.config , so in this case additional font path can be added

To reproduce this I've created a tar with my fonts and ass subtitle file, download from here .

Jellyfish movie sample is here: I use jellyfish-35-mbps-hd-hevc

For those who can't wait until it will be fixed (like me) I made a nasty hack:

#!/bin/sh

FONTS_DIR="/storage/.kodi/media/Fonts"
BASEDIR="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$BASEDIR:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH"

if [ ! -d "$FONTS_DIR" ]
  then
    echo "$FONTS_DIR is missing, exiting..."
    exit 1
fi

uname -m | grep -q "x86_64"
if [ $? -gt 0 ]
  then
    echo "[x] Sorry, this script supports x86_64 only"
    exit 1
fi

lsb_release -a | grep -q LibreELEC
if [ $? -gt 0 ]
  then
    echo "[x] Sorry, this script supports LibreELEC only"
    exit 1
fi

mount | grep -q /usr/share/fonts
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
  then
    echo "[x] Detaching Kodi's fonts from system"
    umount /usr/share/fonts
fi

set -e

echo "[x] Making a copy of system fonts"
cp -r /usr/share/fonts/* $FONTS_DIR

echo "[x] Making an index of font files"
# mkfontscale
"$BASEDIR/mkfontscale" $FONTS_DIR
# mkfontdir
"$BASEDIR/mkfontscale" -b -s -l $FONTS_DIR

echo "[x] Attaching Kodi's fonts to system"
mount --bind /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts /usr/share/fonts

echo "[x] Done"

At the path "/storage" create a new directory with any name (example: fonthack) . Inside the directory create a file (for example runme.sh) and copy content from above to the file and run following command

chmod +x runme.sh 

I've attached dependencies to this post:

libfontenc.so.1      mkfontscale
libfontenc.so.1.0.0

You need to put these 3 files to your new folder (in example above it's fonthack) .

You need to run the file (example: runme.sh) every time when new fonts uploaded to /storage/.kodi/media/Fonts or Kodi's hardware was rebooted.

If everything went ok, you should see following:

LibreELEC:~/fonthack # ./runme.sh
[x] Making a copy of system fonts
[x] Making an index of font files
[x] Attaching Kodi's fonts to system
[x] Done

That's it. You don't need to restart Kodi or anything else. Should work right away. If you was watching movie while doing this, stop the movie and play again. Cheers

Thanks vpeter , symlink is a nice temporary fix which works like a charm. Also seems like fonts.dir and fonts.scale are not mandatory, everything works without these files.