Today I just came across to this thread:
http://www.hi-pda.com/forum/viewthre...extra=page%3D1
And it sounds like a great breakthrough!! Someone actually reverse engineered the E-Ink display interfaces and somehow wrote a PDF reader from scratch (Not REALLY from scratch - it's based on MuPDF, but it's a standalone app, rather than previous hacks like Javascripts or fsklib plugins)
The page is in Chinese, and a rough translation is:
Hi everyone, I've just spent some time to develop a small software. Now it could read PDFs without embedded fonts and cut the white borders for pdf files, but as I developed it in my spare time, it's still rather limited.
1. I haven't got time to reverse engineer libuss.so , so this app could only load pdfs from the internal memory.
2. The screen might flick while loading pdfs. This is due to limitations of MuPDF lib. I used poppler before, but it runs way too slow on prs-505.
3. The reader might be unable to switch to sleep mode. I haven't figured out which CPU register controls this.
4. Must be used on a 505 with custom firmware. (Translator's comment: This sounds rather weird to me.... because this readers seems like a standalone app to me. Somehow I think on not-customized 505s what you do is to create an autorun.sh and it should work....)
Usage:
1. There should be an 'autorun.sh' file, put this line:
/bin/sh /Data/root/select.sh
at the end.
2. Extract root.rar to root dir of the internal drive.
3. Copy any TTF font to root/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ and rename it to simhei.ttf - There must exist such a file or this app won't load correctly.
4. Restart your 505
After restart, a menu would show up:
1. Press '1' to use the app, '2' to load the original Sony menu.
2. A filelist would pop up. Same as Sony app.
3. Press 'menu' while reading pdf to open a new menu. You can jump to a page, or clip the white borders.
4. Press 'Zoom' to switch to 'white border clipping mode'.
While in 'white border clipping mode':
1. There should be a ruler shown on screen.
2. Input numbers for width of white borders. Press directional buttons to set which direction to apply.
3. Use directional buttons to re-adjust width.
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I don't have my 505 with me right now, so it's not possible for me to test it. If someone's interested and have tried it out, I hope he/she could post some comments.
If this app really works as the author says, it'll be a great new breakthrough. I hope the author could publish his/her toolchain and source code, and we can see more programs coming to 505 (Like FBReader, Plucker...) .