Hacked Up Reader for epub/fb2/txt/rtf/html/pdb/etc

[hawhill]

Culex: Yep, the energy consumption will peak on page shifts. However, it should be roughly equal in this case. The eink consumption is probably the biggest part, so switching a full screen is probably the expensive thing here. "top" is somewhat notorious for leading to wrong conclusions (though in most cases regarding memory consumption), that's why I intervened :-) It's a time sample what top is doing and the CPU utilization is a mere estimate. A lot of the values that top shows are actually a bit voodoo :-)

amalewolf: There are two things involved: On the one hand, the bytes in a file map to (abstract) chars, which is commonly called the "charset" or "encoding" of the text. Nowadays, "UTF-8" is kind of a standard here. However, older TXT files might well be encoded differently. The culprit is that TXT files to not carry hints (in most cases) about which encoding they carry. HTML, EPUB, MOBI, PDF etc. are better in that regard. Some programs overcome this by doing guesses. Some encodings know "invalid sequences" (UTF-8 does). A typical convention is to present bytes that do not map to characters with a question mark ("?").
The other thing involved is the font you are using to display characters. Characters or character sequences map to "glyphs" in fonts. Or they might not, because the font does not really carry glyphs for the character in question. A convention for missing glyphs is to present them with an empty centered box. You might have seen those boxes when visiting foreign websites using exotic (for your environment, that is) scripts.

Sooooo... it's a bit difficult. It's not always the encoding which is the culprit, it might also be the font. And vice-versa. Or even both. Then there are documents which specify a wrong encoding and present a lot of invalid characters that way. Some programs ignore encoding information and "magically work" under some circumstances (files matching the fixed built-in encoding). Other programs ignore encoding information and derive it from the byte sequences in the document - and might as well get it wrong.

[amalewolf]

hawhill,many thanks!!
With the google translation I can understand the principle.But for me,maybe the only thing I can do is suport the developers "in spirit"~haha,is that a globe joking?
Maybe I also can test the program to find how to crash it down once more......
thanks again for your patiently interpretation to a layman ^_^

[yiming]

Originally Posted by bhaak

I tested it with the 2 epubs from this link: http://openinkpot.org/ticket/297

Both with the standard and our own freetype library.

test.epub showed only '?' but that was to be expected as I don't have a font on my Kindle Touch that supports chinese characters.

test_embedded_font.epub worked perfect because it had an embedded font.

For testing it would be best if somebody could provide us files that make the program crash (preferably some free samples).

@bhaak

i've done more tests and i think i've figured out how to read Chinese text in the Reader.

txt - the text has to be encoded in UTF8 and "Preformatted text" has to be set to Off.

epub - thanks for your hint, Chinese text will display without problems when "Document embedded styles" is set to off. Unfortunately, the formatting of the page is not perfect - punctuation marks which shouldn't appear in the 1st column such as , . ? ) etc will appear there. but i suppose nothing can be done to fix this problem.

mobi - no problem except the punctuation marks issue mentioned above.

but i've problem reading a particular mobi book, the error message is "Error reading PDB format, can't open document". i've enclosed the book here, could you please see if you know what's wrong with the book. i can read the book in Kindle.

thanks for your great help.

[bhaak]

Originally Posted by yiming

but i've problem reading a particular mobi book, the error message is "Error reading PDB format, can't open document". i've enclosed the book here, could you please see if you know what's wrong with the book. i can read the book in Kindle.

Looking at the file with an hex editor I'm not quite sure what mobi format it is but it is one that seems to be known.

Calibre can read it without any problem so this is a deficiency in the CoolReader engine that it doesn't support that kind of mobi.

[varnie]

The "Open book" dialog now supports directories browsing.
The download is here.

[lukeroge]

Originally Posted by varnie

The "Open book" dialog now supports directories browsing.
The download is here.

Thanks, this is much appreciated.

[danrodz]

Love the work done by varnie and bhaak. The only thing I need at this point is to be able to follow links to footnotes and it will be perfect

[pirl8]

How does it work with firmware 5.1.0? Is the freetype library still recommended?

[varnie]

it works smoothly.
yes, freetype library update is requred. (at least I guess so).

[alaiksander]

I jailbroked my kindle 5.1.0 and installed hackedUp reader. It is amazing apps so far, as I can read more book on different formats, especially chms and epubs. I know the app is in development, but I only curious about a few things.

1. On the "go to page dialog" menu. For some books it display index-like list, but I cant tap it to jump to that page. For the others with no index-like list there is only a blank area in the center. Both the afore mentioned and the later apparently look like a number typing area (because everytime I tap, the 'enter page number' display numbers--it turned out to be page number). Is it only on my kindle?

2. Can you give clues for navigations etc. I dont know where to look for the documentation, I just tried several area on the screen which turn out to switch between pages of menu, go back/forward for books but there is no icons and so on.

Thanks

[varnie]

Hi there.

1)
what package version are you using?
Looks like you use old package by bhaak.
I am asking that because in my latest builds I have tweaked the "Go to page" dialog and now it acts as follows:
if the book has a table of contents it displays it there and you can go to a chapter by clicking on it, otherwise there should be a stylish "Go to page" dialog (similar to the "Search" dialog) with the page number input.

2) let me quote from the docs of bhaak's repo:

When in the main screen, touching in the lower half of the screen opens the next page, touching in the upper half opens the previous page. Touching the top bar will open the menu.

When in the menu, touching the top bar acts as 'Ok', touching the bottom bar on the left side will open the previous menu page, touching the right side will open the next menu page if there are any.

Touching numbered sections in the menu will select them or open any existing sub menu.

[alaiksander]

Should I try this one?

Originally Posted by varnie

The "Open book" dialog now supports directories browsing.
The download is here.

I just need to replace the files in the same installation folder, right?

[varnie]

sure, you should
and, regarding your 2nd question - yes.

[calvin]

are there any updates in the development of the hackedupreader?

The only thing that keeps me away from using this reader permanently is the refresh algorithm.. it makes only partly updates and after a few pages the screen looks 'dirty' and is not good...

[bhaak]

Originally Posted by calvin

are there any updates in the development of the hackedupreader?

My version has a bit fallen behind and doesn't have all the features varnie has added. I add a link to varnie's repository on the thread opener as I can't say when exactly I'll have time again to work on it. I've been away more or less constantly for the last 3 weeks and again this week-end.

Originally Posted by calvin

The only thing that keeps me away from using this reader permanently is the refresh algorithm.. it makes only partly updates and after a few pages the screen looks 'dirty' and is not good...

It is not quite clear to me how the refresh works. Is it a special system call or is it just a simple invert of the screen?

But there is an easy workaround for you. Just press the home button and then it will do a page refresh.

I actually don't like the page refresh for every page that older kindles and most e-ink reader have. It's quite annoying and distracting to me. I can go for quite a long time without a page refresh if the lines are vertically aligned and you don't get any dirt between the lines. As long as there are no images or sub chapters that change the vertical alignment this works quite well for me.