[komali_2]

I've been googling for the last week or so to see if anyone has solved the problem of annotation epubs with a stylus for devices that support it. My goal was to find some app, any app, I could run on Android for Android tablet devices with styluses. As you can guess, that failed, so now my goal is to evaluate whether this is something I have the capacity to program up.

First, I know it's possible: the Boox tablet e-reader app can do it, I went and bought one and tried all sorts of epubs. Works really well too, actually, without too much weirdness on reflow if you change fonts or margins or whatever.

However, Boox doesn't offer their app on any android stores, and I haven't found an APK. Obviously also they aren't open sourcing it any time soon.

So I need to do a proper evaluation. I thought I'd ask here in addition to my googling I'm doing:

1. Does an Android app already exist that allows epub handwritten annotation, and I just failed to find it?

2. Has anyone else tried tackling this, or is in the process of doing so? If so, who, and for what app? Can I help?

3. If you tried and failed, what led to you giving up in the end?

4. In general what kind of implementation strategy should I try? I'm learning about epub format and how apps display things like highlights, I'm hoping the highlight implementation is some kind of UI layer I can draw arbitrary svg style curves on or something, and they have a coordinate system that I can anchor to document locations (in a thread somewhere I can't find right now, someone was speculating this is what Boox does)

5. What open source ebook app should I build this on top of, if any? Reinventing the wheel sounds stupid and pointless so hopefully I can adopt one. So far leaning towards Librera.

These are the questions I'm researching to answer, but any advice is greatly appreciated. Hopefully this is something I'm capable of doing and then we can just have this feature some minority of us have always wanted and that'll be that!