Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I've actually been fairly pleased with FBReader on my old Lifebook running Puppy Linux. It handles Plucker files, and it handles Mobipocket and ePub files as well.
The Plucker compatibility was a big win, as I have about 3,200 books in Plucker format on an SD card in my PDA, and I could copy the lot to my notebook.
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Dennis |
That's cool. What can plucker do for display? Is it fairly basic? (ie: headers, italic, bold, images?)
FBReader can do a
lot. But it's (X)HTML handling is weak (and by extension, ePub.) I'm looking for an open format that can do nice, not necessarily perfect, layout. For me, (X)HTML (and by extension, ePub) seems to be the way.
I've got a book that I want to read right now, that has little aphorisms and pull-quotes interspersed throughout it. I've made decent formatting with it in XHTML, and using CSS. Can't read it on anything except a browser, or Calibre's ebook-viewer. FBReader, CoolReader, some other hacky, crashy, java-based reader I found -- they all ignore CSS, where the magic is. And they don't have bookmarks, which I need to improve the books by marking errors to correct.
It seems like everyone wants to reinvent the wheel -- whereas ebook-viewer uses Webkit, and translates everything into XHTML/ePub before displaying it.
Kovid mentioned something about hacking it a bit, so that lines don't get displayed partially obscured at the top and bottom of the screen. Once that's done, it'll seem to me to have met the basic challenges of a reader. Too bad it can't be extracted from Calibre. It would work well on readers like the Smart Q7 and the Nokia internet tablets, and other tablet-based machines. And it would be ever-compatible with Calibre cataloged and generated ebooks.
The other readers all seem to be about providing (minimal) access to many formats, not about displaying them beautifully and faithfully. It's some sort of engineer mentality, I think. (I like engineers, not disrespecting! Just not the mental frame to view everything through.)
I'd hoped that conversions to FB2 would allow for a more faithful display in FBReader, but it didn't seem to work. Maybe if I hand wrote it -- but I'm pretty sure that there isn't any way to call for display positioning of elements in FB2. For FBReader, I expect that all formats are being translated into FB2 before displaying them -- which limits the display possibilities. Understandable, of course, as it started as an FB2 reader, and all the other formats were added later.
Anyhow, FBreader is good, CoolReader looks promising -- but until someone makes a decent ePub/XHTML reader for Linux that's not trying to be all things...
m a r