Plucker Viewer on Nokia 770 redux

[rsperberg]

Without a linux box and without a Palm or the Nokia 770, it wasn't really viable for me to work in Plucker the last few months -- no way to check what I was doing -- but now that I have a 770 to test with, I am back trying to get an efficient method of making Plucker e-books.

I wanted to advise people here that I am posting screen captures as I'm working things out. You can find them at http://topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/...r-captures.htm.

(There's also a brief report at Internet Tablet Users blog, http://www.internettablettalk.com/blog/?p=170.)

So I have lots of issues with Plucker still, and the implementation on the 770 has some problems (see next post), and this seems like the best place to deal with them.

Roger Sperberg

[rsperberg]

I have been trying different Plucker books in the viewer on the Nokia 770, which I received a week ago. At first I was simply trying it with e-books I made using Plucker distiller, and I know that the Windows version of that is way out of date. So when I had problems I thought it was with my files.

A couple days ago, I tried some books made elsewhere, longer books, and I had the same problem -- although the pdb file seems to be full and complete, only a certain number of pages or lines are displayed in the Plucker Viewer. I make it as about 49 pages in the 770 screen size.

This occurs even when the only application I have open is the Plucker Viewer, and even after resetting the 770. If it is a memory issue, it doesn't seem to be coming from the 770 but from Plucker.

Is this something others have experienced?

For instance, I tried reading the Project Gutenberg-generated version of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (downloadable at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2500 ). The last thing I can see in this text is the end of the paragraph beginning, "This myth, this rumour, this legend resounded."

In the online version of Siddhartha at http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/wor...=2304&pageno=1 , this point appears midway on page 11. The PG text itself extends to page 79.

The last word I can read in the text is the 28,595th character in the book. In a different book (in html), the last word is the 31,292nd character; removing the markup, the last character is the 28,815th character.

If this is simply something I can and should adjust in the Viewer on the 770, perhaps someone could advise me about this.

If not, perhaps the GTK+ or the 770-ported version has a restriction on how long a single page can be.

To explore this issue further, I experimented by taking PG's text, converting it to HTML and breaking it into 12 files, linking each chapter to the preceding and following chapter and to a Table of Contents (itself linked to all the chapters, of course). This created no problems whatsoever. (This is the version used in the screen captures mentioned in the previous post.)

I also opened the CIA World Factbook with high-res color illustrations from memoware (http://memoware.com/?screen=doc_deta...5510&back=main ). At 7.7 mb, it is more than 85 times larger than the original Siddhartha pdb file. It has some 225 separate pages, one for each country and dependency or special-sovereignty-area, all connected to a TOC. Again no problems.

I do not own a Palm so I can't check these texts in the canonical Plucker Viewer, but since so many pdb files seem constructed from a single long text (at least: 'longer than 11 pages') I don't think this is a Plucker issue per se.

* * *

Another problem I'm experiencing is with characters displaying properly. When I make Plucker pdb files using the Windows distiller, any special character -- dash, bullet, true-quote -- shows up as garbage characters or unrecognized characters, no matter what encoding I use for the text or for the output. The Nokia 770 is, of course, a Linux computer. Instead of Windows-1252, what encoding do Linux devices like?

* * *

One more thing: in the Nokia 770 version (as others have noted), after adding a book to the library, I've found I must first exit Plucker and relaunch to see the title. To delete a title from the library I must also delete the file from the MMC card or else its entry persists.

Thanks,

Roger Sperberg

PS: I've posted this report and questions on the Maemo-users mail-list. Apologies in advance for cross-posting, but I think the overlap is minimal.

Update: I just started a new thread with another question I have about Python. It only now occurs to me that some or all of my problems might be related to that problem. The thread is Plucker and Pythons, plural

[Alexander Turcic]

Impressive screenshots, Roger!

What's especially nice about the 770 display is that it is native widescreen. Why is that so important? Obviously reading a book in widescreen format is more natural as it better resembles the format of a real paper book. Although I rotate the screen of my Dell Axim 90 degrees to widescreen mode, it doesn't look very good because of the physical properties of an LCD. The fonts look blurred and unfocused, and makes my head dizzy after only a few minutes.

Sounds to me like the Plucker port for the Nokia is still buggy. I have never heard of any page limits for Palm or Pocket PC users. Have you tried converting a book with Sunrise?

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by Alexander

Although I rotate the screen of my Dell Axim 90 degrees to widescreen mode, it doesn't look very good because of the physical properties of an LCD. The fonts look blurred and unfocused, and makes my head dizzy after only a few minutes.

The readability of the Nokia 770, with 225 pixels per inch, is incredible. Tiny, tiny type is really legible. I'm reading sizes far smaller than I anticipated.

Sounds to me like the Plucker port for the Nokia is still buggy. I have never heard of any page limits for Palm or Pocket PC users. Have you tried converting a book with Sunrise?

There are some bugs in the ported Viewer right now. I've sent this information to Nils Faerber, of Kernel Concepts, who did the port of Bill Janssen's GTK+ Viewer, to see what he makes of it. I want to raise the issue here, however, in case it's a Plucker-preparation issue and not a programming issue.

Right now I'm only able to use Plucker Desktop and Sunrise to create pdb files. I don't know the reason, but about half the pdb's I make with Plucker Desktop fail to display anything more than one screen's material in the 770's Viewer. So these reported results are with files made using Sunrise (and externally supplied files, as noted).

I'll post my Python issue/problem in a separate thread, so as to keep discussion close to the thread title. And then maybe it'll be easier to get some of it into the Plucker Documentation wiki.

Given that many Plucker pdb files start as single large files, I figured it wasn't a problem that occurs with the PDA Viewers.

Roger

Update: After posting a new thread, Plucker and Pythons, plural, it only now dawns on me that some of my problems might be related to the version of Python I currently have installed (and can't upgrade).