PDF reader replacement for 505(from hi-pda)

[DairyKnight]

Today I just came across to this thread:

http://www.hi-pda.com/forum/viewthre...extra=page%3D1

And it sounds like a great breakthrough!! Someone actually reverse engineered the E-Ink display interfaces and somehow wrote a PDF reader from scratch (Not REALLY from scratch - it's based on MuPDF, but it's a standalone app, rather than previous hacks like Javascripts or fsklib plugins)

The page is in Chinese, and a rough translation is:

Hi everyone, I've just spent some time to develop a small software. Now it could read PDFs without embedded fonts and cut the white borders for pdf files, but as I developed it in my spare time, it's still rather limited.

1. I haven't got time to reverse engineer libuss.so , so this app could only load pdfs from the internal memory.
2. The screen might flick while loading pdfs. This is due to limitations of MuPDF lib. I used poppler before, but it runs way too slow on prs-505.
3. The reader might be unable to switch to sleep mode. I haven't figured out which CPU register controls this.
4. Must be used on a 505 with custom firmware. (Translator's comment: This sounds rather weird to me.... because this readers seems like a standalone app to me. Somehow I think on not-customized 505s what you do is to create an autorun.sh and it should work....)


Usage:
1. There should be an 'autorun.sh' file, put this line:
/bin/sh /Data/root/select.sh
at the end.
2. Extract root.rar to root dir of the internal drive.
3. Copy any TTF font to root/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ and rename it to simhei.ttf - There must exist such a file or this app won't load correctly.
4. Restart your 505

After restart, a menu would show up:
1. Press '1' to use the app, '2' to load the original Sony menu.
2. A filelist would pop up. Same as Sony app.
3. Press 'menu' while reading pdf to open a new menu. You can jump to a page, or clip the white borders.
4. Press 'Zoom' to switch to 'white border clipping mode'.


While in 'white border clipping mode':
1. There should be a ruler shown on screen.
2. Input numbers for width of white borders. Press directional buttons to set which direction to apply.
3. Use directional buttons to re-adjust width.



--------------

I don't have my 505 with me right now, so it's not possible for me to test it. If someone's interested and have tried it out, I hope he/she could post some comments.


If this app really works as the author says, it'll be a great new breakthrough. I hope the author could publish his/her toolchain and source code, and we can see more programs coming to 505 (Like FBReader, Plucker...) .

[RufusA]

Looks very interesting. I have my 505 with me, so attempted to download and install.

Extracted the necessary files to the memory of the 505 and created an autorun.sh in notepad in the rootiest directory I could access.

Rebooted the 505 (using the reset button), and it started normally, but with no custom startup menu.

My thoughts are that the autorun.sh needs to be placed somewhere more special than can be accessed by simply by plugging in the 505 in to usb.

Perhaps the Universal Flasher needs to be used to get the file in the right place!

Won't have a chance to play properly until the weekend, but hopefully someone who knows what they are doing will have better success before then.

Rufus.

[allon_pan]

Hi RufusA, many Chinese users had hacked firmware to support Chinese natively. Thus in this case, autorun.sh is not in root directory, but under a "Chinese" directory. Attached directory structure of the typical Chinese version firmware.

[allon_pan]

I never try this app, so only add one thing to see if you can run it up:

the autorun.sh contains 1 cmd line: #!/bin/shmount --bind /Data/chinese/FONT /opt/sony/ebook/FONTmount --bind /Data/chinese/resources /opt/sony/ebook/application/resources

[porkupan]

Originally Posted by allon_pan

the autorun.sh contains 1 cmd line: #!/bin/shmount --bind /Data/chinese/FONT /opt/sony/ebook/FONTmount --bind /Data/chinese/resources /opt/sony/ebook/application/resources

rather:

#!/bin/sh

mount --bind /Data/chinese/FONT /opt/sony/ebook/FONT
mount --bind /Data/chinese/resources /opt/sony/ebook/application/resources

[marypinchesme]

ok, my problem is the txt is to light is there any way to darken the txt I have a sony prs-505 thanks, just a girl

[zaino]

Anyone tried this? It's really interesting. Margin crop in-device would be lovely.

[dpierron]

I'm also interested in this, but I didn't try it ; does anyone have pointers to PRS hacking sites or resources ?
Wouldn't it be great if we could replace the reader software with FbReader, or even simply change the default font in the mobile ADE ?

[ElwoodCash]

Been looking for something like this..Thanks!