KPV: a PDF reader for Kindle, based on muPDF, GPLv3

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by medwatt

Thanks all for the chm support. The CHM support has been working with some books but its crashing with this. The document is attached.

I tried to open it with cool reader and it also crashes. Seems like an upstream bug, can anyone else confirm that?

[eLiNK]

great release and great last-second changes
Thanks

[NuPogodi]

Thanks for new release. I do not need add 'lost' extentions by myself anymore. So I've made only a couple of minor improvements which make my life more comportable:

1. The default font in crereader.lua (line 54, "FreeSerif") is still worth of replacing by "Droid Sans"

2. As zip-extentions are now allowed, crereader.lua feeds non-existing zip.css to crengine. The best way to solve this problem is to unzip the selected file & to look for the extention of the contained filestream. As I have no ideas how to realize this feature in terms of lua, I've solved this problem in a 'dirty' way, i.e. I've added few lines which allow me to localize the needed style.css for files like "anyfile.extention.zip"

Just insert in crereader.lua (line 34, just before your comment "these two format use the same css file")

-- try to find double extentions like filename.extention.zip
if file_type == "zip" then
-- store filename without zip-extention to fn
local fn = string.lower(string.sub(filename,0,-4))
-- if no double extention then default file_type
file_type = string.lower(string.match(fn, ".+%.([^.]+)") or "fb2")
end

BTW, I'm afraid that already reported problem of the font selection is somehow related to absent css-styles. At least, adding the above code solves this problem for *.fb2.zip-files (see absolutely adequate screenshot, the cff-fonts are not deleted)

3. It should also be useful (say, for illustration & debug purposes) to make screenshots. I've again used the 'dirty' method - just added a hotkey (Shift-P) which stored the /dev/fb0-content to raw-file (crereader.lua, line 315)

self.commands:del(KEY_P, MOD_SHIFT, "P") -- screenshot

-- make screenshot
self.commands:add(KEY_P, MOD_SHIFT, "P",
"make screenshot",
function(cr)
os.execute("mkdir ".."/mnt/us/kindlepdfviewer/screenshots")
local d = os.date("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
showInfoMsgWithDelay("making screenshot...", 2000, 1)
os.execute("dd ".."if=/dev/fb0 ".."of=/mnt/us/kindlepdfviewer/screenshots/" .. d .. ".raw")
end

But I still hope that I'll have an opportunity to make screenshots directly (*.png or *.bmp), rather than raw-files that require succeeding conversion.

[knc1]

Originally Posted by dave2008

I tried to open it with cool reader and it also crashes. Seems like an upstream bug, can anyone else confirm that?

I tried opening it with a couple desktop viewers.
It did open and display.
Trying to print-to-pdf hung the viewers that I was trying.

Note: these where Linux system viewers (didn't notice which ones) not the Windows native viewer for chm format.

So there might be something funky about that file's format. Hard to say for sure.

[SP777]

Several remarks.

In the doc view:

1. When opening the "go to page" it's better to show the progress bar with current/total pages (currently invoked by the Menu key) than just print the current page number. It's important to see the total number of pages as well.

2. Finer steps in zoom/pan (2%, 5%) sometimes are needed.

3. Columns sometimes are not recognized properly in the two column view.

There is a good way to recognize any number of columns (not just two) and their exact boundaries. View the page as rasterized bitmap. Sum up the number of active pixels in each pixelwide column of the page. Zero or low values will show all the blank space (page and intercolumn margins).

4. The current way of text highlighting (gray underlining) is very weak, it doesn't really highlight. Maybe black underlining should be used or full background marking (as in the native viewer).

In the file browser:

1. Screen saver behaves differently than in the doc view. It freezes the current view not showing the screen saver picture.

2. It would be good to have some file manipulation abilities. At least file deletion (Del key) and renaming (maybe Aa key).

[medwatt]

My kindle 3 just froze up today. The upper half displays the screensaver while the lower half works. What a shame ! !

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by medwatt

My kindle 3 just froze up today. The upper half displays the screensaver while the lower half works. What a shame ! !

That sounds like a broken glass substrate on the physical eink display, and not a "froze up" problem. I recently broke a screen like this on one of my k3g kindles.

[medwatt]

The lower part is working though.

[geekmaster]

Originally Posted by medwatt

The lower part is working though.

That is normal for broken displays. Everything below and to the right of the damage still works. I wrote a scroll program to let you rotate the part of the display covered by damage (like menus) down to the working area. It was published in this forum some time ago. You probably should turn on voice navigation, which makes the kindle read the hidden menus to you in the TTS voice you selected. It helps a LOT when you have a damaged display.

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by NuPogodi

Thanks for new release. I do not need add 'lost' extentions by myself anymore. So I've made only a couple of minor improvements which make my life more comportable:

1. The default font in crereader.lua (line 54, "FreeSerif") is still worth of replacing by "Droid Sans"

Could you give a reason for switching to Droid Sans as default font?

Originally Posted by NuPogodi

2. As zip-extentions are now allowed, crereader.lua feeds non-existing zip.css to crengine. The best way to solve this problem is to unzip the selected file & to look for the extention of the contained filestream. As I have no ideas how to realize this feature in terms of lua, I've solved this problem in a 'dirty' way, i.e. I've added few lines which allow me to localize the needed style.css for files like "anyfile.extention.zip"

Just insert in crereader.lua (line 34, just before your comment "these two format use the same css file")

BTW, I'm afraid that already reported problem of the font selection is somehow related to absent css-styles. At least, adding the above code solves this problem for *.fb2.zip-files (see absolutely adequate screenshot, the cff-fonts are not deleted)

3. It should also be useful (say, for illustration & debug purposes) to make screenshots. I've again used the 'dirty' method - just added a hotkey (Shift-P) which stored the /dev/fb0-content to raw-file (crereader.lua, line 315)

But I still hope that I'll have an opportunity to make screenshots directly (*.png or *.bmp), rather than raw-files that require succeeding conversion.

Thanks for you patches, I will add it to master branch. It will be even better if you can send a pull request in github next time

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by knc1

I tried opening it with a couple desktop viewers.
It did open and display.
Trying to print-to-pdf hung the viewers that I was trying.

Note: these where Linux system viewers (didn't notice which ones) not the Windows native viewer for chm format.

So there might be something funky about that file's format. Hard to say for sure.

Yes, I also tried to open it with kchmviewer and the hh viewer come with wine. Both of them even fails to open it. But the native windows viewer has no problem.

I will report this to upstream.

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by SP777

Several remarks.
4. The current way of text highlighting (gray underlining) is very weak, it doesn't really highlight. Maybe black underlining should be used or full background marking (as in the native viewer).

Oh, I forgot to mention that the highlighting feature is configurable ;P

Just updated the user guide for it:
https://github.com/hwhw/kindlepdfviewer/wiki/Userguide

See if this meets your need.

Originally Posted by SP777

In the file browser:

1. Screen saver behaves differently than in the doc view. It freezes the current view not showing the screen saver picture.

2. It would be good to have some file manipulation abilities. At least file deletion (Del key) and renaming (maybe Aa key).

Yes, Screen saver does not work for filebrowser (but works for file searcher). We left it unfixed so the release can be out earlier. ;P

File manipulation features will be included in the new UI framework, we are doing a major rewrite currently.

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by medwatt

My kindle 3 just froze up today. The upper half displays the screensaver while the lower half works. What a shame ! !

OMG, did you remember how you trigger this? Does it also happen to the native system?

Originally Posted by geekmaster

That sounds like a broken glass substrate on the physical eink display, and not a "froze up" problem. I recently broke a screen like this on one of my k3g kindles.

Though I am not going to do that, I am curious about how to reproduce it ;P

[NuPogodi]

Originally Posted by dave2008

Could you give a reason for switching to Droid Sans as default font?

AFAIK, FreeSerif is just not included in the release, so setting FreeSerif as the default font is a nonsense, isn't it? Well, I do not insist on exactly Droid Sans, but the default font should nevertheless be distributed with the kindlepdfviewer-release.
PS. I guess the title "kindlepdfviewer" should eventually be replaced by something more universal. What do you think about unireader? Most users will think that this name means UNIversalReader (and it's the case), but only advanced ones will understand that the program is named after UNIversitätstadt Göttingen

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by NuPogodi

AFAIK, FreeSerif is just not included in the release, so setting FreeSerif as the default font is a nonsense, isn't it? Well, I do not insist on exactly Droid Sans, but the default font should nevertheless be distributed with the kindlepdfviewer-release.

Oh, I see. I have changed it, thanks for pointing out this