Quote:
Originally Posted by GregorRichards
Knowing in advance that I would be dissatisfied with the PDF reading on the IREX, I planned to write my own. And now I have! This is a PDF reader aimed towards those who usually read technical papers.
Features: - Rather than using general-purpose pan and zoom, uses a set of predefined "strategies". This simplifies use at the cost of generality.
- One strategy is two-column mode, with which it splits columns. That is, the page will be viewed in two parts (landscape mode), the first part will be the top-left and bottom-left of the original page, and the second part will be the top-right and bottom-right of the original page. This way, two-column pages can be read completely with only one refresh.
- Since the strategies always define exactly how much to move, moving about the page never depends on exactly how much you've zoomed. For example, the "half page" and "two-column" strategies will always get from one page to the next in two steps.
Unfeatures (features I don't have, and may or may not have in the future): - No explicit zoom. Margins can, as such, be annoying. This goes against the design intent, but some smart margin elimination may be nice.
- No annotations/scribbling.
- No bookmarks or other such memory.
- No support for PDFs with DRM.
Bugs: - Doesn't use the nice DR800 menu in any way, instead uses its own bar at the top of the screen.
- FIXED in alpha2: Screen refreshes more often than it ought to (two refreshes for every page turn)
- Partially FIXED in alpha2: The initial file selection dialog is tiny and not easy to use.
- The code is hideously ugly, as it's a horrible amalgam of gtk-splash-test.cc from poppler and my weird strategy system. Needs some rearchitecting.
- Many, many more!
This is just a technology preview. I am not finished with this, but I'm at a point where it works so I'd like to show it off and ask other peoples' opinions. Here's the basic usage:
Extract the .zip to your SD card. When TechPDF is run, it presents the user with a dialog to select a PDF file. This starts in the "TechPDF" directory on the SD card. (I didn't want to take one of the preexisting directories :P). When you've selected a file, it displays it in full-page mode, which is more-or-less exactly like the default in the standard IREX PDF viewer. You may at this point rotate as you please, and choose a strategy from the menu at the top of the screen. When a strategy is chosen, it will refresh the screen into that strategy (duh). You can skip pages with the "go to page" button, and close the application with the "X" button.
If anybody finds this interesting or has comments or suggestions, feel free, I'd love your input.
Source and binaries available at https://dev.mobileread.com/trac/tech...rsion0.0Alpha2 |
This, and your previous ports for DR800, look fantastic.
One note: if you don't use iRex bottom bar maybe you could make your app fullscreen.
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