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mdp · 05-02-2018, 12:44 PM

A little information about the software I tried.

Kingsoft Office: the best, the one I use (version 5.7 or 5.12). Stopped development in 2014.
On the Max2, the cursor is static, which is nice. Battery consumption is very low: at pondering pace, I consumed about 5% of battery per hour. I miss, as stated, the ability to select text faster (to select word by word instead of just char by char).

WPS Office: the successor of Kingsoft. Faults, in the versions I used: * it does not have a zoom control anymore, so all you have is "pinch to zoom" (too bad not everyone has a multi-touch screen, see the MaxCarta); * again you cannot make the cursor (and the selection) jump by word; the "scroll" mode ('Web view' in Kingsoft) makes the text grey instead of black, which is terrible on EPD. People say it's full of ads.

Softmaker's TextMaker Free: the "shareware" version, abandoned in 2012, and still very good. It has the problem of not updating (invalidating?) the screen upon selection - you select text and nothing happens on the screen, you have to use indirect tricks to verify that it has done it.
Softmaker has turned into developing a more featureful product, "SoftMaker Office HD for Android". I tried to use it in the past, but at the time it required an activation, which I could not provide.

Mobisystems's OfficeSuite Free: I could make it work yesterday, and today already crashes at launch. I cannot remember the glitches (/more/ glitches?).

AndrOpen Office: very, very promising. But it flashes on the EPD screen - there is some "unlinear process" behind it that makes it work oddly, and this is a consequence (I guess its platform is like the "create an X windows system on Android and connect to it through a local remote desktop trick" we have tried in past threads). Otherwise, it would easily be heaven.

LibreOfficeViewer: the team has started porting LibreOffice to Android (almost) natively, but there is still a long road ahead. The option for editing is there, but already page rendering takes a very long time.

As for the other three mentioned in the previous post: they require an Internet connection, which is madness: I strictly intend to be able to work anywhere, anytime. Not to mention the privacy of documents.

05-02-2018, 12:44 PM	#3
mdp Wizard Posts: 1,481 Karma: 9010563 Join Date: Jul 2013 Device: none	A little information about the software I tried. Kingsoft Office: the best, the one I use (version 5.7 or 5.12). Stopped development in 2014. On the Max2, the cursor is static, which is nice. Battery consumption is very low: at pondering pace, I consumed about 5% of battery per hour. I miss, as stated, the ability to select text faster (to select word by word instead of just char by char). WPS Office: the successor of Kingsoft. Faults, in the versions I used: * it does not have a zoom control anymore, so all you have is "pinch to zoom" (too bad not everyone has a multi-touch screen, see the MaxCarta); * again you cannot make the cursor (and the selection) jump by word; the "scroll" mode ('Web view' in Kingsoft) makes the text grey instead of black, which is terrible on EPD. People say it's full of ads. Softmaker's TextMaker Free: the "shareware" version, abandoned in 2012, and still very good. It has the problem of not updating (invalidating?) the screen upon selection - you select text and nothing happens on the screen, you have to use indirect tricks to verify that it has done it. Softmaker has turned into developing a more featureful product, "SoftMaker Office HD for Android". I tried to use it in the past, but at the time it required an activation, which I could not provide. Mobisystems's OfficeSuite Free: I could make it work yesterday, and today already crashes at launch. I cannot remember the glitches (/more/ glitches?). AndrOpen Office: very, very promising. But it flashes on the EPD screen - there is some "unlinear process" behind it that makes it work oddly, and this is a consequence (I guess its platform is like the "create an X windows system on Android and connect to it through a local remote desktop trick" we have tried in past threads). Otherwise, it would easily be heaven. LibreOfficeViewer: the team has started porting LibreOffice to Android (almost) natively, but there is still a long road ahead. The option for editing is there, but already page rendering takes a very long time. As for the other three mentioned in the previous post: they require an Internet connection, which is madness: I strictly intend to be able to work anywhere, anytime. Not to mention the privacy of documents. Last edited by mdp; 05-02-2018 at 12:46 PM.