[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Rhialto

Obviously he means professional in the sense of books FOR professionals. Technical books on software, web design, and most textbooks for example are usually PDFs.

Nothing to do with *publishing*.

No, Rhialto. That's exactly my point. It has everything to do with publishing.

I trust you're not suggesting professionals are somehow sub-human -- that what is true for human beings in general, does not apply to "professionals".

I am a professional, too, and I hate PDF files. Like Jakob Nielsen said years ago, PDFs are unfit for human consumption.

Again, publishing any textbook in the PDF format exclusively, is proof of laziness, or lack of education, on the part of the publisher. And on the part of the readers, too, if they willingly put up with it, even striving to find excuses for it, instead of demanding the publishing of all electronic texts in the accessible and user-friendly EPUB (or MOBI/equivalent) format.

[ilovejedd]

I buy a bunch of O'Reilly books and while they provide a number of different formats (including epub and mobi), I invariably gravitate towards PDF. I hate PDF for fiction but for technical manuals, etc, I find PDF to be better. I reckon a measure of interactivity is going to be necessary to provide some of the benefits of a fixed page layout.

[Faterson]

Depends on the quality of the PDF versus the EPUB. I can't imagine why a PDF file would ever be preferable over an EPUB that is well-done.

In practice, though, EPUBs often have such bad quality (see archive.org) that people (including myself) prefer to read the book in PDF. Not because of any intrinsic advantage of the PDF format (there is none!) -- only because the EPUB version is so badly done.

EPUB is still very much a "new" format compared to PDF, and it will take some time until publishers start paying proper attention to it. And after they do, no one in their right mind will prefer PDFs over EPUBs; including for studying technical books and textbooks.

[Terisa de morgan]

Faterson, how good are mathematical formulas in ePub? I don't really know.

[Faterson]

Hi Terisa, on principle, there is no problem displaying mathematical formulas (or whatever!) properly in EPUBs. I know it's a common prejudice to say they can only be properly displayed in PDF files, but that's nonsense. It's true it may sometimes take much effort on the part of the publisher to ensure that mathematical formulas (and such) are displayed properly in EPUBs -- and that is why, publishers being human beings and therefore lazy, they instead prefer to push a button and spit out an unwieldy PDF file at the hapless reader.

After all, EPUBs are nothing but modified HTML files (or webpages, if you will) -- and you can properly display anything you want, on a webpage. Even if it were in the shape of inserted glyphs (small pictures) embedded within standard text -- that would still be preferable over hitting users over their heads with unwieldy PDF files, just to save the publishers the effort required to produce a proper EPUB edition.

When our fellow poster ilovejedd said he/she preferred PDFs for reading technical stuff, I wonder if he/she ever also reads technical stuff on the iPhone? I do -- not that I wish to, but that's life: you get distracted all the time, so that I constantly need to take turns between reading the same books on both the iPad and the iPhone. I spend perhaps 90% or 95% of my time reading books on the iPad, but the remaining 10% or 5% of reading the same books on the iPhone, are not negligible.

Sorry, but the PDF files' fixed page layout is exactly the problem here -- what makes PDFs totally unusable for electronic publishing. If we could ensure we would only ever be reading PDF files on comfortable 10-inch iPad screens, everything would be fine. That's far from reality, however. We often also need to read technical stuff on 3.5-inch or 4-inch or 5-inch iPhone or Android screens, even if only intermittently. At that point, at the very latest, PDF files and their fixed page layout, pretending as if the tiny smartphone screen were an entire standard sheet of physical paper (!), become an intolerable nuisance.

Bottom line: PDF files are a hopelessly outdated concept trapped within the 20th century universe of physical office sheets of paper. Nothing could be more irrelevant today, in the age of mobile devices. Like Jakob Nielsen said, PDF files are superb for one thing, and one thing only: printing. (One might also add: for capturing the graphical layout of anything that has been scanned/photographed for posterity.) For pretty much everything else, PDF files suck mightily -- especially for reading (and therefore also for publishing) books, regardless of the book's genre: technical or not, textbook or not. PDF, go away at long last and leave us alone.

[lucretius]

Hi kguil, Thanks a lot for Marvin. It is the best eBook reader I have ever seen, the functionality is amazing and the design of the UI is just wonderful.

Just have a question regarding the last update.
Is there a reason why you have removed the "experimental iOS dictionary"? I found it quite useful as it allowed me to have my iPad language settings in german but still had the possibility to access the built in dictionary when reading english books.
Thanks

[kguil]

Hi lucretius. Short answer: in many, many cases this wasn't working properly and was creating many support problems.

Long answer and solution:
I don't believe iOS has a programmatic way switch the language of the system dictionary. Previously, I tried doing this using a trick that isn't very reliable (hence the "experimental" label). iOS 6 supports English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese offline dictionaries and the language that is shown when you try to define a word depends on the language your iPad's keyboard is in.

Nonetheless, you can still achieve the same functionality as in pre 1.5. I set up a tutorial on how to do this and explains what's going on at blog.marvinapp.com. It seems complex but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to switch offline dictionary languages in a couple of seconds.

I hope this helps.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by kguil

Short answer: in many, many cases this wasn't working properly

I would say the precise answer is: it never worked, and it only created the illusion of working, due to the extremely buggy and silly, inefficient way Apple set up offline dictionary support in iOS.

In other words, Lucretius, nothing has changed in this regard in Marvin 1.5, and everything works just like it used to. Enjoy!

[lucretius]

Ok, so I was just one of the lucky ones where the dictionary worked without problems. I know that it works with the additional keyboard but I liked the possibility to have a setting within Marvin without affecting the whole system.
Accessing multiple dictionaries is working in iBooks too without an additional keyboard but it seems that Apple allows certain techniques only for their own applications.
Thank your for the quick response. I will continue to be a very happy Marvin user, thanks for all the hard work you put into this wonderful application!

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by lucretius

I liked the possibility to have a setting within Marvin without affecting the whole system.

I would have liked that possibility, too, because it's, in fact, the only reasonable way for the offline dictionary to work. But no matter what I tried, the dictionary never worked as intended. The blame lies squarely at Apple's door. They do not make it possible to switch the dictionary language transparently on-the-fly (see the Kindle app!), although this should be elementary. The iOS offline dictionary is built on the silly assumption that all iPad users are strictly mono-lingual and only ever read texts in their single, native language.

Also, as a native speaker of German, you may have noticed the extremely bad quality of iOS's German dictionary. It fails to identify even some of the most basic words of the German vocabulary, if they happen to occur in a text in an inflected form, which they do most of the time, naturally. Given such abysmal lack of quality, the current solution made possible in Marvin 1.5 -- the option to use, for example, the standard Duden German dictionary as your default -- is superior over what iOS has to offer in this department. I believe it's irrelevant that the Duden is not an "offline dictionary"; the iPad is pretty much an "Internet-dependent" device, anyway.

[kguil]

To be fair, I acknowledge the possibility that it is me who didn't manage to find a way of doing this. On the other hand, I've never seen an app that is capable of switching the iOS dictionary language on demand. If anyone knows of one, please let me know.

[Faterson]

The ability to switch the iOS dictionary language on-the-fly should be directly given to every iOS user system-wide. This shouldn't be the responsibility of developers of individual apps like Marvin.

For example, as I'm typing this forum post, I might wish to check, in the dictionary, one of the words I'm typing. The language I'm typing in could be any language. I happen to be typing this particular post in English, but using the Slovak iOS keyboard, because it's not worth switching to the English iOS keyboard just for the sake of this post. The assumption that the active iOS dictionary language should depend on the language of the active keyboard, is plain silly.

There's no other way to put it: the dictionary feature in iOS is a disaster. Only 6 languages are supported 6 years after the initial release of iOS. That is pitiful. The quality of the dictionaries themselves is as bad as can be: no internal search in them is possible; all hyperlinks in them are dead (!!!) ; you can't look up the definitions of words used in definitions themselves, etc.

The dictionary feature in iOS is an utter failure by Apple at this point. It's great that Marvin, in version 1.5, allows us to use alternative, top-quality dictionaries of our own. (I recommend the third-party Lingvo app offering many dictionaries from top-of-the-line publishers.)

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Faterson

For example, as I'm typing this forum post, I might wish to check, in the dictionary, one of the words I'm typing. The language I'm typing in could be any language. I happen to be typing this particular post in English, but using the Slovak iOS keyboard, because it's not worth switching to the English iOS keyboard just for the sake of this post. The assumption that the active iOS dictionary language should depend on the language of the active keyboard, is plain silly.

How do you expect the system can guess the language? As good as Word? Or OpenOffice, which is not better? Sorry, programming language here, not cristal ball.

[Terisa de morgan]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Hi Terisa, on principle, there is no problem displaying mathematical formulas (or whatever!) properly in EPUBs. I know it's a common prejudice to say they can only be properly displayed in PDF files, but that's nonsense. It's true it may sometimes take much effort on the part of the publisher to ensure that mathematical formulas (and such) are displayed properly in EPUBs -- and that is why, publishers being human beings and therefore lazy, they instead prefer to push a button and spit out an unwieldy PDF file at the hapless reader.

After all, EPUBs are nothing but modified HTML files (or webpages, if you will) -- and you can properly display anything you want, on a webpage. Even if it were in the shape of inserted glyphs (small pictures) embedded within standard text -- that would still be preferable over hitting users over their heads with unwieldy PDF files, just to save the publishers the effort required to produce a proper EPUB edition.

A book full of pictures for math formulas? Sorry, I don't think it's a good option. I've tried it and it's not much better than PDF, for me at least. Till ePub isn't able to show my end of career project (math project) in the same way than latex/tex/PDF without having to print all the formulas as pictures, it's not a good layout for technical books.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

How do you expect the system can guess the language? As good as Word? Or OpenOffice, which is not better? Sorry, programming language here, not cristal ball.

Who talks about guessing? That kind of auto-switching never works properly, especially not in MS Word.

I'm saying users should be given the option to manually, transparently switch the iOS dictionary language on demand, on-the-fly, whenever they wish. (Look at the Kindle app.)

PS: I disagree with you that the rigid PDF format is preferable for displaying math formulas. EPUB is a relatively new format so it's not easy to create certain types of books in it as of 2013, but that doesn't mean PDF is a better solution long-term.