Adobe Digital Edition 1.5 final is available

[Nate the great]

It is probably very close to MobiDesktop. But MobiDesktop does all the work, not the portable device.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I see what you're saying, yes. I was sort of assuming (perhaps wrongly) that it would work a little like the Mobi Desktop Reader which does "smart things" with a portable Mobi device plugged in via USB. You can set it up, for example, to automatically sync new content to the attached device. That requires it to specifically recognise the device that's connected as being another Mobi device, rather than merely an external USB file system.

Yeah, you can actually setup calibre to do that as well (though only from the command line at the moment). Basically you can recognize when a SONY reader is plugged in because although it is mounted as a disk drive in the OS, the OS also has the vendor and product id information of the device available to it. USB devices always make this information available to the host OS.

[edsohsmith]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

Why don't you plug in your 505 and see if DE recognizes it?

I plugged in the PRS 505. It was not recognized by DE. We await the software update.

[astra]

Originally Posted by ProfJulie

You THINK it's an important part of reading, but that's your perception now. I thought so too, but after using my Cybook for a while, my perception has changed.

The Cybook does not use page numbers and, really, for an electronic book on an electronic book reader, page numbers are not very relevant - at least the page numbers that are associated with a paper book. The progress indicator that runs along the bottom of the screen is a much better indicator for an electronic reading device.

That's why you are using CyBook and I am using Sony Reader
To each its own.

[TallMomof2]

Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin

Mac as well ;-)

Seriously, what we do it to burn enough information into PDF (or EPUB), so that same document can be opened on any device activated by the same user. This is a different approach from Acrobat days, where the PDF file was re-encrypted and locked to a particular handheld device.

So does that mean if the provider no longer supports the PDFs (Amazon after they stopped selling PDFs), I would still be able to access the PDFs. I'm not referring to ones already orphaned by Amazon, that would be too good to be true, but to current and future purchases from various vendors.

Your protection scheme sounds similar to the one from eReader where the DRM info is locked into the document not the device.

[Jim Lester]

Originally Posted by TallMomof2

So does that mean if the provider no longer supports the PDFs (Amazon after they stopped selling PDFs), I would still be able to access the PDFs. I'm not referring to ones already orphaned by Amazon, that would be too good to be true, but to current and future purchases from various vendors.

Your protection scheme sounds similar to the one from eReader where the DRM info is locked into the document not the device.

Yes the migration process will work irrespective of where you bought the PDF files, and only requires an connection to Adobe servers. There are some cavaets however.

The most important is that you must still be able to read the PDF file (in either Adobe Reader 6,7 or DE 1.0) on the computer where you are doing the migration.

The second is the PDF files which you purchased are associated with an existing activation account. DE 1.5 will associate only one such activation account with an Adobe ID. This works relatively well if you purchased all of you books on one computer. If however you purchased your content on multiple computers, and those computers were activated separate accounts (either different named activations, or "Easy" anonymous activations), you will not be able to consolidate all of you books under a single AdobeID.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Hmmm by the way... Still no support for justification in DE ? For multi-column documents using XSL-FO, justification is necessary. Multi-column without justification is just plain ugly...

Any answer ?

[Peter Sorotokin]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Hmmm by the way... Still no support for justification in DE ? For multi-column documents using XSL-FO, justification is necessary. Multi-column without justification is just plain ugly...

Yes, it is not yet supported. We'll have it eventually, of course.

The reason is that we need to pull new low-level line layout code which would support bidi, glyph composition, etc. and we are hesitant to add features to the current branch.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin

Yes, it is not yet supported. We'll have it eventually, of course.

The reason is that we need to pull new low-level line layout code which would support bidi, glyph composition, etc. and we are hesitant to add features to the current branch.

Sure I can understand why you're hesitant to add new features to a stable branch.

There's a lot of newspapers in France working on e-paper editions, I'm sure that they would be amazed by the sort of things possible with proper use of CSS+XSL-FO in a mobile environment. Multi-columns layouts with justification and hyphenation that would reflow with a different number of columns... That's something that would be gorgeous to demo.

Hyphenation is the main reason why I still use PDF instead of another format on the current crop of e-paper devices. I can't help thinking that the text looks like a screen instead of a book, without some of these basic typesetting rules.