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Old 11-05-2011, 06:44 AM   #1
MrWarper
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New developer in town, or something. Prospective questions...

Hi all,

questions I've been delaying until I have a non-shared DR1000S I can play with at leisure...
exactly what components of the DR software do we have the sources of? I know we haven't the sources for the UDS (the main document viewer - what does "UDS" stand for?), but that it has some sort of plugin architecture I'd like to know more about, so please correct me where I'm wrong. As I have understood everything so far, each file type can be opened in the DR by a standalone application, or an UDS plugin, so UDS can provide a common interface for everything, with the page tabs, tool bar, etc.

I'm not particularly interested in PDFs right now, but I might dab in that at some point to improve it a little. Is the built-in PDF viewer such an UDS plugin? Do we have the sources?

Has anyone had a peek into the image viewer plugin (assuming it's an UDS plugin too)? Would it take very long to adapt it to view multipage images, like TIFF book scans?

And what about the HTML viewer? The one in FW v1.7 was too basic, and I understand the new one in 2.0rc3+ is an adapted version of Google's Chrome.
Is it a standalone application?
Do we know what version it is?
Do we have the sources?
Could a more modern version be used instead?
Can "normal" browser extensions be used with it? I have a full-fledged HTML editor written in JavaScript that could turn the DRs into true proof-reading devices.

That's all for now...
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Old 11-05-2011, 10:31 AM   #2
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Hi MrWarper,

See my comments below.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
Hi all,

questions I've been delaying until I have a non-shared DR1000S I can play with at leisure...
exactly what components of the DR software do we have the sources of? I know we haven't the sources for the UDS (the main document viewer - what does "UDS" stand for?), but that it has some sort of plugin architecture I'd like to know more about, so please correct me where I'm wrong.
A good place to start is with the published code from iRex see here, the SDK contains all the stuff you need for the emulator. Sources contains the used/modified Kernel sources, the used/modified third-party applications and the iRex firmware components.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
As I have understood everything so far, each file type can be opened in the DR by a standalone application, or an UDS plugin, so UDS can provide a common interface for everything, with the page tabs, tool bar, etc.
I do not have that much experience with the UDS plugins, but, yes the pagetabs (at the bottom) and the toolbar are provided by UDS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
I'm not particularly interested in PDFs right now, but I might dab in that at some point to improve it a little. Is the built-in PDF viewer such an UDS plugin? Do we have the sources?
There is no code for the pdf-plugin, mainly because it uses a non-public Adobe library. The plugins only provide the data to show, you can not change the behaviour of UDS.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
Has anyone had a peek into the image viewer plugin (assuming it's an UDS plugin too)? Would it take very long to adapt it to view multipage images, like TIFF book scans?
The code for the image plug-in is public, see the links above. I have not looked into it very much, so I can not answer your specific question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
And what about the HTML viewer? The one in FW v1.7 was too basic, and I understand the new one in 2.0rc3+ is an adapted version of Google's Chrome.
Is it a standalone application?
Do we know what version it is?
Do we have the sources?
Could a more modern version be used instead?
Can "normal" browser extensions be used with it? I have a full-fledged HTML editor written in JavaScript that could turn the DRs into true proof-reading devices.
The erbrowser-application is used to view html (see published sources), it is a WebKit based browser. The e-ink used for the display gives a lot of restrictions for applications, erbrowser was specifically designed to handle these restrictions. So porting another browser (or even a newer version of WebKit) will not be easy, also note that the CPU of the reader is not very powerfull.

There is a lot more information (hidden) somewhere in this forum, so searching/browsing it will also give you a lot of information.
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Old 11-05-2011, 05:12 PM   #3
MrWarper
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Hello Mackx, thanks for your reply.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mackx View Post
...the SDK contains all the stuff you need for the emulator. Sources contains the used/modified Kernel sources, the used/modified third-party applications and the iRex firmware components.
Yes, I downloaded everything from there just in case it disappeared with iRex and started already to leaf the manual. Is there any use for the stuff under the "3.0" directories? Anything else needed to start fooling around (besides a real or VM Linux system with all the stuff in it)?

Quote:
...
There is no code for the pdf-plugin, mainly because it uses a non-public Adobe library. The plugins only provide the data to show, you can not change the behaviour of UDS.
OK, so if I want to do anything with PDFs, either I write a standalone application or a new PDF plugin from scratch, right? Dammit, all I might need is some tweaking...

Quote:
...
The erbrowser-application is used to view html (see published sources), it is a WebKit based browser. ... porting another browser (or even a newer version of WebKit) will not be easy, also note that the CPU of the reader is not very powerfull.
It's certainly powerful enough for the stuff I've tried (and I've tried some nasty pieces of JavaScript). I haven't felt a real need to replace it so far, actually; I was thinking more about keeping up with current CSS support and bug fixing, just in case.

Anyway, another hypothetical question (I haven't had a real look at code yet, this is just some warm up). I really like the UDS interface so in principle I'd prefer to build any new stuff as plugins. Do you think it would be a lot of work to modify the erbrowser and make it into an UDS plug-in?

Quote:
...
searching/browsing it will also give you a lot of information.
Sure, I always search and read before I ask anything, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, so please feel free to tell me to go RTFM anytime -- as long as you tell me where any specific FMs are

Last edited by MrWarper; 11-05-2011 at 05:14 PM. Reason: wording, clipping text
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Old 11-06-2011, 04:48 AM   #4
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As a side note, if you plan to write apps for the DR and use IREX provided libs you should be familiar with glib/gtk+/cairo/pango/dbus stuff for common tasks and UI.

One problem though, is that libs versions are a bit older, so it's not possible to test everything compiling for a x86 linux computer.

Using other toolkits (qt, wx, etc) will be difficult because there are not ready for e-ink.

Anyway feel free to ask anything. And welcome,
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Old 11-06-2011, 09:46 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
Yes, I downloaded everything from there just in case it disappeared with iRex and started already to leaf the manual. Is there any use for the stuff under the "3.0" directories? Anything else needed to start fooling around (besides a real or VM Linux system with all the stuff in it)?
You can look at the older stuff (i.e. 1.7) for the pdf-plug-in based on the poppler library. In 1.7 pdf was a public plug-in and mobi was the 'private' plug-in with DRM.
The iOn Development Environment.pdf is an important document to start with, but you probably discovered that already.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
OK, so if I want to do anything with PDFs, either I write a standalone application or a new PDF plugin from scratch, right? Dammit, all I might need is some tweaking...
For a pdf-plug-in see the 1.7 source, note that the interface for the plug-in is probably changed, so you will need to do some tweaking. Note however that the closed-source UDS program handles all menu-function, so adding changing/functionality will not be possible when using the plug-in approach.
For the stand-alone pdf-viewer, better wait for Iņigo
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
Anyway, another hypothetical question (I haven't had a real look at code yet, this is just some warm up). I really like the UDS interface so in principle I'd prefer to build any new stuff as plugins. Do you think it would be a lot of work to modify the erbrowser and make it into an UDS plug-in?
I think that UDS is not good at handling dynamic content, if I remember well a buffer with the content for a page is requested. UDS decides when to show it and how long to cache is.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWarper View Post
Sure, I always search and read before I ask anything, but it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, so please feel free to tell me to go RTFM anytime -- as long as you tell me where any specific FMs are
Well, the forum is like a maze, it is hard to find anything and if you found it, its is hard to find it back again (when you forgot to make a short-cut, as I normally do ).

As Iņigo already sad, just ask any question, there are several people that are willing to help.
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Old 11-07-2011, 04:01 PM   #6
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At least some part of the pdf plugin seems to have been published. Look at document-viewer-plugins-4.0+svnr7001/plugins/pdf. I don't know how useful this is though, I haven't looked closely at it (yet).
Also there's some code for the pagebar used by UDS in libs/ergtk (erGtkPageBar.c).
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Old 11-08-2011, 06:59 PM   #7
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@rvs: thank you for the info, I've added that to mi link collection.

@Iņigo: Hola Actually, my plan is to enjoy my DRs as much as possible writing as little code as possible, with the least possible effort, so I'd rather learn whatever I need before trying things like QT or whatever the iRex guys didn't consider. Thank you for the warning.

Currently my only projects (and I won't start real coding very soon) are extending the image viewer so it can handle multiple-image TIFFs (if it's not too difficult I'd extend it to read other multi-image formats and zipped image collections, like .cbzs) and tweaking the browser as I hit its limits with my HTML format for ebooks (hopefully not too much).

@Mackx: thank you for the hint about UDS. Also, it'll be probably very interesting to compare the old PDF stuff and see if we can spot any changes in the sources rvs pointed us to.
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