iLiad A new pluggable ipdf

[scotty1024]

I just announced the death of idjvu over in the idjvu thread.

My plans for this weekend are to refactor ipdf into a pluggable viewer framework.

My plan is to release 3 viewers with the new ipdf.

1. wrapper for Poppler e.g PDF support
2. wrapper for DJVULibre e.g. DJVU support
3. wrapper for my RTF parser e.g. Baen RTF ebook support (and yes, I'll still be doing the read direct from ZIP trick.)

The ipdf will use direct to screen memory page transfers with an X window popup place holder for it (so X doesn't get confused.) It will have a full 8 bit path for crisp text.

Support for improved decoding time and error dispersion of images will be in the next release of the Poppler wrapper (sorry, only so many hours this weekend.)

[vranghel]

Good luck with yor project scotty.

I've been following your progress with keen interest!

I (and no doubt many on this forum) apprecaite all the time and effort you are putting into this. I'm sure something useful will come out of it!

[Antartica]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

I just announced the death of idjvu over in the idjvu thread.

My plans for this weekend are to refactor ipdf into a pluggable viewer framework.

So you will ease the creation of new viewers for the rest of us. Thanks :-).

Originally Posted by scotty1024

The ipdf will use direct to screen memory page transfers with an X window popup place holder for it (so X doesn't get confused.) It will have a full 8 bit path for crisp text.

Uh? What's that popup thingy?

Originally Posted by scotty1024

Support for improved decoding time and error dispersion of images will be in the next release of the Poppler wrapper (sorry, only so many hours this weekend.)

Anyway, big thanks for your work :-b.

Sources?

[Mike Kostousov]

Can you publsih then idjvu sources? While you are tweaking new pdf, we will be happy to user old djvu, but with zoom and without black band in the right.

Originally Posted by scotty1024

I just announced the death of idjvu over in the idjvu thread.

My plans for this weekend are to refactor ipdf into a pluggable viewer framework.

My plan is to release 3 viewers with the new ipdf.

1. wrapper for Poppler e.g PDF support
2. wrapper for DJVULibre e.g. DJVU support
3. wrapper for my RTF parser e.g. Baen RTF ebook support (and yes, I'll still be doing the read direct from ZIP trick.)

The ipdf will use direct to screen memory page transfers with an X window popup place holder for it (so X doesn't get confused.) It will have a full 8 bit path for crisp text.

Support for improved decoding time and error dispersion of images will be in the next release of the Poppler wrapper (sorry, only so many hours this weekend.)

[scotty1024]

The cold hard realities of the ashes of hope are settling in.

Collaboration with iRex is going nowhere. I'm working on software that has a high potential of bricking the iLiad of someone that doesn't exercise enough caution with its installation. And iRex did not design things like er_registry.txt with 3rd party software installers in mind.

The pluggable ipdf is all good stuff from a technology view though.

I inspect ZIP files. A Baen RTF file gets paged into Pango (solved some issues for me from my previous backend PDFBox). A collection of JPG/PNG's gets paged as a graphic novel or you can put a slideshow time value into the manifest.xml and it flips pages automatically as a slideshow.The same self advance value can be applied to PDF's and DJVU's as well.

I've figured out where to modify Poppler to do the enhanced image ED and accelerate CITT decoding via libtiff. But swapping out libpoppler has a very high pucker factor.

Even my x48 port requires a dangerous edit to the er_registry.txt to install the SHELL hack.

With no means of safe software distribution its all beginning to look very pointless.

[CommanderROR]

So, once again we need to wait for iRex to give us an "unbricking" option or, even better, a "legal" way of installing software. There was a post at their forums today indicating that they are qorking on that solution, but I wonder when we'll see it...


Here is the link to the iRex statement:

http://forum.irexnet.com/viewtopic.php?p=3166#3166

[jæd]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

With no means of safe software distribution its all beginning to look very pointless.

Isn't that the nature of developing for an unsupported system/hack...? (Though its certainly interesting seeing what the Illiad is capable of...)

[scotty1024]

Originally Posted by CommanderROR

So, once again we need to wait for iRex to give us an "unbricking" option or, even better, a "legal" way of installing software. There was a post at their forums today indicating that they are qorking on that solution, but I wonder when we'll see it...


Here is the link to the iRex statement:

http://forum.irexnet.com/viewtopic.php?p=3166#3166

As per their usual: long on concept, short on details and totally devoid of delivery dates.

[DHer]

"they will learn patience."

[scotty1024]

They must remember why they need us.

[Matthijs]

I think it is a shame that the initial good-spirited communication and the incredible accomplishments (in such a short time) seem already forgotten.

I'm more than willing to help this community with their development (even though I'm incredibly busy working on the next release), but there are some things I cannot just 'magically' make appear or happen.
Even so, I think that if we keep communicating and work around the problems together, we get a lot further.

If there are any reasonable requests or questions related to this, please post them on the iRex forum and I/we will react, as I've done to date with all such requests that were posted there.

[scotty1024]

Originally Posted by Matthijs

I think it is a shame that the initial good-spirited communication and the incredible accomplishments (in such a short time) seem already forgotten.

Exactly, the paraphrase above is taken from V for Vendetta as the dictator exhorts everyone to greater efforts to stop the "terrorists".

So far I've helped show how to speed up the PDF reader and deliver sharper text at the same time. I've developed viewers for three new file formats for the platform. Delivered a much needed screen capture program, ported a calculator emulator to the e-Ink panel and worked to deliver safer means for people to execute all the above. I've also been busy working up PXA-255 MMX primitives to speed up additional operations. All of which you were aware of.

What has iRex done since then, other than try to lock people out of using the applications developed? You know how many emails I'm getting from people unhappy with being on 2.7.1? Emails from developers whom paid to get their iLiad's re-flashed when their e-Ink panels failed (not re-flashed because they bricked their units via development) and got back 2.7.1?

People begging me to give them an exploit back into their iLiad's?

Have I been running around giving out exploits?

No, because I figured it would upset you all to have to keep diverting efforts to keep locking us back out of the box.

If I truly had negative feelings I'd be making your lives miserable by slowly releasing exploits to speed up your release cycles.

For my part I couldn't even get the Poppler version number out of you! I had to spend time guessing what base version to work from. And frankly the only reason for it was to spend countless hours polishing the graphics primitives to support your firm's business issues about the quality of embedded images in PDF's.

Cooperation is a two way street. What good is a SDK when only a crazy few can run the code it generates? And those crazy few are constantly walking a tight rope above a chipper shredder waiting to claim them and remove their ability to continue working on code.

Such an environment separates the weak from the strong, and the strong tend to not be shy about sharing their thoughts about the cloud of virtual shredded corpses swirling around them.

What do we want? We'd like a re-flash utility.

Turn off bricked iLiad: push reset button.
Hold connection button in upper right.
Slide power switch on, hold until special blink sequence on LED.
Release power switch, wait for iLiad to turn back off.

The re-flash would grab a factory clean user filesystem image off the /mnt/free in the M-System's DOC and re-install it into the user filesystem. Restoring the iLiad back to factory original and boot-able state.

That's a cheap 20MB safety blanket to leave in /mnt/free.

We'd like either a chroot -u sandbox -g sandbox [SHELL] enhancement to ContentLister to execute files with extensions of .sh or .SH. Or a chrooted Sandbox that the iLiad would run on startup out of /etc/rc5.d/S99sandbox.

You can examine the ZIP file I created and uploaded as an example of how gnuchess could be packaged to not need any root user, or root filesystem, access.

[Matthijs]

I'll get some sleep before reacting to this big post. But:

Originally Posted by scotty1024

For my part I couldn't even get the Poppler version number out of you! I had to spend time guessing what base version to work from.

I am not aware of a request from you about the poppler lib version number or anything related, so I don't understand this remark at all.

[jæd]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

Cooperation is a two way street. What good is a SDK when only a crazy few can run the code it generates? And those crazy few are constantly walking a tight rope above a chipper shredder waiting to claim them and remove their ability to continue working on code.

Which SDK is this...? So far I've only seen Irex release source & tools... I thought the SDK was still being finalised...?

[arivero]

Originally Posted by jæd

Which SDK is this...? So far I've only seen Irex release source & tools... I thought the SDK was still being finalised...?

Jaed, the "tools" contain all (or most of) the libraries plus the headers, it is sort of a mistake that they announced it simply as a "chaintool" and thus some people has not looked into it. Of course, one still needs documentation and some more examples. And of course, a full SDK would be something more on the way of Scotty's "pluggable ipdf", with generic g++ classes etc.