Thread: Linux reader software
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Old 10-01-2009, 08:21 PM   #12
DMcCunney
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rogue_ronin View Post
That's cool. What can plucker do for display? Is it fairly basic? (ie: headers, italic, bold, images?)
Pretty much. HTML support is pretty good, though CSS support is lacking.

It supports embedded images and hyperlinks, text attributes (bold/italic/etc.) and custom fonts on the PDA if you run Palm OS 5.

I got started in ebooks because a former employer decided the IT folks should all have PDAs, and a Handspring Visor Deluxe showed up in interoffice mail. I went looking for software that could help me do my job, and discovered Plucker, which would let me convert the HTML based manuals for a lot of the systems I dealt with to a form I could read on the PDA.

Somewhat later, I discovered I could comfortably read fiction that way, and now have the entire Baen Free Library and a bunch of stuff from PG and elsewhere in Plucker format.

There's a Windows Mobile based product called Vade Mecum that views Plucker files, and the Plucker dev list recently had a chap pop up doing a Plucker viewer for the iPhone, which will be very nice.

Quote:
I'd hoped that conversions to FB2 would allow for a more faithful display in FBReader, but it didn't seem to work. Maybe if I hand wrote it -- but I'm pretty sure that there isn't any way to call for display positioning of elements in FB2. For FBReader, I expect that all formats are being translated into FB2 before displaying them -- which limits the display possibilities. Understandable, of course, as it started as an FB2 reader, and all the other formats were added later.
I don't think it's converting to fb2 format for display. Simpler, I think, if you can read the foreign format in the first place to just display it.

I expect that sort of conversion to occur on the desktop in the program that creates the files viewable on the reader (like Mobi Creator ripping stuff to HTML, and creating the Mobi file from that.)

Quote:
Anyhow, FBreader is good, CoolReader looks promising -- but until someone makes a decent ePub/XHTML reader for Linux that's not trying to be all things...
I wouldn't hold my breath. The demand will be for an all-in-one solution ala FBReader.
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Dennis
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