Quote:
Originally Posted by Micah
Text selection in iOS is a lot better than on Android. It is a tricky thing to implement as the rendering engine we use (RMSDK) generates images of pages, rather than "live" text. So when selecting text, we are actually calculating what words are under your finger, and then updating the bitmap of the page to show a highlight. We will be making it better on Android this Spring. Curious which device you were talking about?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Micah
PDF can be very problematic for text selection. Really depends on how the PDF was contructed (varies *hugely*) Sometimes what looks like text is not actualy text, other times there are no "space" characters between words. Also, RMSDK (our rending engine) only supports the PDF/A spec - other PDF's will often/usually at least render most text, but selection can be problematic in that case too. Are you experiencing this with EPUB or PDF?
Text selection in our app is acheived in a very different way (custom code) than in most iOS apps that leverage Apple iOS API's. This relates to our ability to support DRM (decryption). Some folks find it easy, others find it annoying - in particular due to the differences in the way it works from other apps. Worse on Android at the moment, which is high on our list to improve.
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Thanks for the answers, Micah. Like I mentioned, I was talking about both iPad 3 and iPad 1, and I wasn't talking about PDFs but about ordinary EPUB books where I seem unable to highlight text properly. I can twist and turn my finger in all sorts of ways, but it's just not happening. Selecting text everywhere else in iOS is effortless for me. Meanwhile, I have upgraded to iOS 6.1 on iPad 3, and the issues are just as severe as before. Right in the default EPUB offered by Bluefire,
Treasure Island. I can shoot a video if you don't believe it's impossible to select text properly here.
At least, what you say above definitely confirms my impression that text selection in Bluefire Reader works very, very differently from the way it works elsewhere in iOS. Unfortunately, the change is for the worse. It's a show-stopper for me, but there are others. For example, there is no possibility to adjust paragraph spacing in Bluefire Reader, something that my fellow MobileRead posters know I'm obsessed about.
And you mentioned you're proud of the annotations feature in Bluefire -- and I agree it's pretty fine, but take a look at the same annotations feature in Marvin, and it blows your implementation out of the water. Things like export/import/restore/sharing of annotations don't exist in Bluefire, nor are there any annotations of multiple colours (very useful for me).
The best of luck to you, and I hope all the e-reader apps can continue inspiring one another, each striving to be better than the rest.
