Plucker and images

[rsperberg]

Having a Windows laptop and not having a Palm, I haven't used Plucker until recently (or even been able to use Plucker). Now I'm beginning to make e-books for the Nokia 770's Plucker Viewer.

That device has 16-bit color. I opened the CIA_World_Factb-hires.pdb file from Memoware in the Viewer running on the virtual machine in Maemo and the images were solid black boxes.

I didn't think much of that, but a test I ran with a black-and-white photo as a JPEG had the same black boxes. Replacing the image with a GIF worked fine.

I thought, well, the virtual machine doesn't like more colors than 64K, so I ran a test with 16-bit BMP images. Complete blanks in the Viewer.

What formats are most successful for images? Any best practices to follow? If this is old knowledge, where should I go to look?

One further question -- I'd like to include two versions of wide images, one for Palm-width readers and one for the 800-pixel wide 770. How does one put in multiple versions of an image for different devices?

Thanks,

Roger Sperberg

[TadW]

Hi Roger,

First let me say thank you for your great presentation of the Nokia 770 platform. It looks very promising!

I can only answer one of your questions... as far as I know, you cannot include two different versions of the same image in a Plucker document. Instead, you would have to create two separate Plucker files.

[rsperberg]

TadW -- thank you for you kind comment about the tutorial. I will keep expanding it.

I guess I have misread something David Desrosiers wrote on The eBook Community at Yahoo Groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-.../message/22939 ).

What does a less-capable Palm do when confronted with a higher-res, color, bigger image than it can display?

I have so far only gotten some color GIFs to display in the Maemo SDK's Plucker Viewer. If you want to take a look (at least they're 700+ pixels wide), they're at:

http://topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/...mg2-3girls.png
http://topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/...img1-jayne.png

Roger

[hacker]

As I mentioned in reply to the email you sent me a few days ago... you have to use maxwidth/alt-maxwidth and maxheight/alt-maxheight to get the effect you're after.

For example, maxwidth=320 alt-maxwidth=700

This will produce a "default" image of 320 pixels wide, and when tapped upon, will expand to a 700 pixel image (with sufficient available RAM to unpack, of course). If you don't have enough ram to unpack the "full" image, it will just throw an error.

Plucker Desktop has some "smarts" built into it that will downsample the image to a lower bpp or resolution, if it can't display it with the parameters you've specified. Its one of the reasons I don't use it (besides the fact that it requires a GUI and is interactive, of course).

There are a lot of open issues with Plucker Desktop that need to be resolved... its great for learning how to use Plucker, but its not the best way to use Plucker (right now) if you want a powerful distiller. It lags behind the Python distiller by about 18 months or more (as do Sunrise and JPluck).

Stick with the Python distiller, forgoe the GUI applications and you'll uncover the powerful features you seek (tables, much more granular image support, lots of other things).

[rsperberg]

Yes, your email went right over my head, not the least reason being that it was about using a different distiller.

Thanks for going into greater detail here. I'll move to the Python distiller and see what I come up with.

Roger

[rsperberg]

The only thing I've found in the documentation says that you can set the number of bits per pixel to 8. That would be 256 colors. Is Plucker limited to displaying 256 colors or can it handle 64K?

Thx

Roger

[hacker]

Plucker can handle up to 65k colors (16bpp).

[Colin Dunstan]

Originally Posted by rsperberg

The only thing I've found in the documentation says that you can set the number of bits per pixel to 8. That would be 256 colors. Is Plucker limited to displaying 256 colors or can it handle 64K?

Thx

Roger

Roger, I am afraid the documentation is somewhat outdated. As David said, you should be able to deal with 16bpp images.

[hacker]

A lot of pieces of the project are outdated... we've asked hundreds of times (literally) for people to help us figure out where the deficiencies were in the docs, manual, distiller, etc. and help us fix them.

So far, noboldy has stepped forward, so the docs and the rest of the issues will just sit collecting dust. Its an unfortunate result of everyone related to Plucker being busy with other things, day jobs, other projects, and none of the users contributing back to help us get a new release out or fix up the exisiting documentation.

The last release of Plucker was on May 22nd, 2004 (almost 14 months ago). The last release of Plucker Desktop was on October 21, 2003. (almost 21 months ago).

We're still hoping that people will help us fix up lingering issues in the project that we don't have time to focus on ourselves.

If making a new release of Plucker is important to users, they should let us know.

[rsperberg]

Not having a Palm, and mostly interested in the e-book aspect of Plucker as opposed to offline reading of websites, I'm not the perfect candidate for updating the docs, but that _is_ my bent.

Is someone keeping a list of issues where the documentation is outdated? Or perhaps there is a list of things that are different in the newest version from the version represented in the documentation.

I may be able to assist in preparing a "This is what the documentation doesn't tell you"-type document, from a naive user's standpoint, if I can keep asking questions and getting them answered here. As you can see from my "making e-books for the Nokia 770" tutorial, I like to put these things down and share them. I'm also big on the "show a picture" approach to help (certain) people get a fix on what's being talked about. Obviously that's not real useful in regards to the Python distiller, but even there some screen grabs could be helpful.

And like you all, I too am overbooked. But I always volunteer when asked.

Roger

[hacker]

The latest version of the manual (mostly just a hand-conversion from the LaTeX version to SGML), can be found here. Start with the SGML and just email me back any updates or comments or whatever you find is missing or incorrect.

I'm hoping to make it as simple as possible, so even my elderly grandmother could follow it step by step without any complications. That also includes finding relevant sections of the manual for any problem she (or anyone else) might run into.

From there, I'd like to make proper pdf versions and mobile versions... see what you can come up with. I'm also available most days on IRC at irc.plkr.org in the channel #plucker.

[rsperberg]

One of the experiments I've done is to take Doc Searls' and David Weinberger's essay, "World of Ends: What the internet is and how to stop mistaking it for something else" and turn it into a pdb file. The "experiment" was with colors and type and simple tables and a screen capture is now part of the tutorial I did.

The pdb file is available at topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/WorldofEnds.pdb, and I've posted it to Memoware. (It's interesting reading on its own, IMO.)

This particular ebook I made with Plucker Desktop. A one-column, one-cell table turned out fine, but the other tables in the document did not. What are the improved table-handling capabilities in the Python distiller?

Thx,
Roger

[hacker]

Originally Posted by rsperberg

This particular ebook I made with Plucker Desktop. A one-column, one-cell table turned out fine, but the other tables in the document did not. What are the improved table-handling capabilities in the Python distiller?

Well, Plucker Desktop does not support tables (nor does JPluck or Sunrise), but the Python and C++ Plucker distillers do, when passed the --tables argument to the parsing commandline.