Quote:
Originally Posted by NiLuJe
@mirage: CRe (KOReader's main ePub engine) is not a chunked renderer. It takes the full book, processes it, and caches it. This essentially ends up as a giant roll of papyrus. Rendering a page is then as simple as picking a starting point from that roll.
This makes actually navigating a book extremely fast (moderately faster than the KePub render, slightly faster than any of Kindle's various renderers, massively faster than the RMSDK).
The obvious trade-off is that generating this first intermediate layer is time consuming (but most of it only affects the first time a book is opened, since this ends up being cached). That's the tiny progress bar you see in the top-left corner when opening a book.
The other trade-off is that changing anything that affects how the text will be laid out (on the book's scope, not on the page's scope) means a part of this intermediate rendering has to be thrown out and re-done (and, once again, tiny progress bar after a short while).
On a novel-sized, sanely coded fiction ePub, initial open should take a couple seconds at most, and re-layout roughly a second at most.
Larger books will affect that performance penalty adversely. As would tricky/degenerate code. Given how KePubs are made, a KePub will be very slightly worse off that a plain ePub.
Since you ultimately end up spending 99.99% of your time reading, and that every setting can be remembered as default, that's an acceptable trade-off in my book.
It might not be for you. Fair enough.
On the other hand, if your first instinct was to play with every setting affecting layout, and you happened to do that in a giant/poorly coded book, that definitely won't be any fun.
Try to do that in a short book first (e.g., KOReader's quickstart guide) to get your sea legs  . |
The problem is that on asymmetric devices, such as Kobo Libra H20, screen rotation is essential. Every time you switch hands, you want to rotate the screen by 180 degrees. For the book I'm currently reading it takes KoReader approximately 10-12 seconds to rotate the screen by 180 degrees (it performs to reflows, one for a 90 degree rotation and then another one). While I love KoReader otherwise, the slow screen rotation makes it unusable for me.