iLiad FBReader

[Adam B.]

I was able to get FBReader to open up files directly from the contentlister. See here for instructions. The problem I have, is that when launching from contentlister, the hardware buttons stop working.

After changing iliad_refresh.conf to match the settings in dillo , the ghosting went away, but it still doesn't refresh correctly when the program starts. I may take Matthijs' advise and try to have FBReader update the screen itself without using the hacked libX11. I'm not sure what all is invloved in that, but it's worth a shot.

[firekat]

This is all just so cool! Thanks for all the work guys!

[Adam B.]

Updated! See first post.

[Riocaz]

Adam, you do realise that you've just about made my decision for me in regards to whether or not I stick with the iLiad?

[Adam B.]

Glad to hear it. I know this will be a critical piece of software for the iLiad. For those who need to, you can probably set this as default for handling txt and html files. I'm sure it will be a better reader than iRex's solution for those.

There's still work to be done, and I may be at the limits of what I can do. But I know there are others in this forum that are smarter than me.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by Riocaz

Adam, you do realise that you've just about made my decision for me in regards to whether or not I stick with the iLiad?

I'm guessing that this decision is somewhat contrary to the one you seem to have been leaning towards in your recent posts, then, Riocaz?

[Riocaz]

Not really.

I still want iRex to acknoledge their obligations.

But this is a big step in the right direction.

[nekokami]

Adam, I was digging around and found this in a discussion about porting editors:

About the keys: all iLiad hardkeys are mapped to normal keyboard keys.
The flipbar is PgUp and PgDn, the arrow up/down keys are Up and Down, the confirm key is Return, the UP key is Home. Long presses are different keys: F1 through F6.

So you might be able to trap the "Home" key to go back to the content lister.

[CommanderROR]

This really makes me want to go back to the Iliad...

Maybe somebody will get a similar feat done for the STAReBOOk but i'm not so sure since it's not really as "open" as the Iliad has now become...we'll see.

Now,I'd like to see an install script for this...YOKOS? so that I don't have to reformat the books my girlfriend reads on the Iliad to PDF...^^

[Adam B.]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Adam, I was digging around and found this in a discussion about porting editors:

So you might be able to trap the "Home" key to go back to the content lister.

Good catch. I'll take a look at the code and options to see what I can do.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by Adam B.

The close button was a simple enough addtiion. It doesn't have an icon, but that's alright because the default "icon missing" icon is an X.

See the attached KDE Flat icons (download the entire theme here), one of which might work for "close". The circle with vertical bar is often used for exit or window-close, although I'm not sure why, and an X is the other typical close icon. These are 32x32, which should be close enough to FBReader's 34x28 icons (if not there is always FlatSVG). Flat is released under the LGPL, so it can certainly be used here.

The standard FBReader icons look surprisingly good on the iLiad, but I also have a complete set of Flat-based icons for FBReader if you are interested.

[NatCh]

That 'circle/bar' icon is a power symbol -- I mean it's used to mark power switches, not that it's some political or arcane symbol.

[firekat]

I am watching from the sidelines right now hoping that someone will come up with a package for this.

A couple of questions; Will FBReader just take all sorts of html files without having to go through the manipulation of an xml file like you have to do with the iRex viewer? Will it display multiple pages, or does it have to be all one page? Will links and/or drop down select boxes work?

Another question is does FBReader have the option of inserting a line between paragraphs? I have noticed in the illustrations that it indents are the only thing differentiating paragraphs. ( I just visited the FBReader page - it appears that you can set different formatting parameters - does that function work in this porting?)

On a side note, though I have not tried the iRex companion software from what I see it does not have any availability of automatically formatting documents for best viewing on the iLiad. I was hoping that would be a possible function and it certainly would have made things much easier for the laity.

To all, keep up the good work!

[NatCh]

I haven't used FBReader, so I can't speak to what it does or doesn't do (though I've heard good things about it), but there's a list of supported formats on it's homepage.

Main features:

* Supported formats are

o fb2 e-book format (style attributes are not supported yet).
o HTML format (tables are not supported).
o CHM format (tables are not supported).
o plucker format (embedded images are supported, tables are not supported).
o Palmdoc (aportis doc).
o zTxt (Weasel format).
o TCR (psion text) format.
o RTF format (stylesheets and tables are not supported).
o OEB format (css and tables are not supported).
o OpenReader format (css and tables are not supported).
o Non-DRM'ed mobipocket format (tables are not supported).
o Plain text format.

* Direct reading from tar, zip, gzip and bzip2 archives. (Multiple books in one archive are supported.)
* Supported encodings: utf-8, us-ascii, windows-1251, windows-1252, koi8-r, ibm866, iso-8859-*, Big5, GBK. Automatic encoding detection is supported.
* Automatically generated contents table.
* Embedded images support.
* Footnotes/hyperlinks support.
* Position indicator.
* Keeps the last open book and the last read positions for all opened books between runs.
* List of last opened books.
* Automatic hyphenations. Liang's algorithm is used. The same algorithm is used in TeX, and TeX hyphenation patterns are used in FBReader. Patterns for Czech, English, Esperanto, French, German and Russian are included in the current version.
* Text search.
* Full-screen mode.
* Screen rotation by 90, 180 and 270 degrees.

Features, planned for future versions:

* Dictionary integration.
* Automatic scrolling.
* Bookmarks.
* Tables support.
* Support for other e-book formats.

They also have a link for a list of requests that have been submitted.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by firekat

A couple of questions; Will FBReader just take all sorts of html files without having to go through the manipulation of an xml file like you have to do with the iRex viewer? Will it display multiple pages, or does it have to be all one page? Will links and/or drop down select boxes work?

The just released version 0.8.0 of FBReader also runs under Windows XP, so you can try it out if you have a XP (or Linux) Desktop. I assume the iLiad port is of version 7, and I would not reccomend upgrading to version 8 yet (because it is brand new).

FBReader does handle multi-file HTML documents, but all the files have to be local (typically in one directory, or one zip file). I almost always convert HTML to Plucker, which means I get one file and essentially a simplified HTML layout (still with links). The notes on version 8 says it will now invoke an external browser for non-local links. Note that it does not handle tables in any file format.

For screenshots of FBReader on a PepperPad, see the MobiPocket Java Reader on Pepper Pad 3 thread. These include shots from a set of HTML's in a zip file. As the title suggests, I was originally posting about the Mobipocket reader - but I ended up saying more about FBReader. I certainly did not think then that FBReader would be available on the iLiad before Mobipocket.