Marvin 3.0.7

[kguil]

This is a quick one:

• New: new custom header and footer placeholders to show percentage values to one or two decimal places.
• Updated: Left/right tap zones are a bit larger.
• Updated: Top-right create bookmark tap zone is bigger.
• Miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

Check out blog.appstafarian.com for tutorials about these new features.

If you have a moment, please remember to rate and review Marvin. It really helps a lot.

Happy reading.

[Rezn8r]

>>Updated: Top-right create bookmark tap zone is bigger.

Thank you, thank you.

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by kguil

• New: new custom header and footer placeholders to show percentage values to one or two decimal places.

That's a huge improvement – many thanks!

Please consider allowing us the use of <b></b> and <i></i> tags, for bold and italics, in custom headers and footers.

To illustrate, here is my current setup of custom headers and footers in Marvin (click for full size):



Or, to zoom in on the footer directly:



Hope you can see what I'm getting at. That's a lot of data in a single footer, right? But I find each component crucial, so I'd certainly like to keep all the data in the footer. Yet it would certainly help if I could structure the data better, using bold, italics, and bold italics. Some data in that footer are more important than other data. (Ditto for header.) Right now, I have structured the footer so that the most important data is at the very start (percentage inside book) and at the very end (pages left in chapter) of the footer – those initial and final numbers tend to stand out the most quite naturally. But having bold and italics at one's disposal would help even further, in organizing the data in the footer clearly.

PS: This screenshot also illustrates the damnable page-count issue. It's a screenshot from the first page of the book's final chapter – and Marvin claims that that final chapter is both 11 and 5 pages long! The correct data is, of course, 5, whereas the "left in book" data (11) is totally off. (And so is "195", of course.) After "flipping the page" (13-inch iPad Pro here), the "11" goes down to 9 or 8, then to 6 or 5, etc. – utter nonsense.

[JKenP]

To me it looks like the books is 195 pages with 11 left that could include an appendix or such after the final chapter which is 5 unread pages.

[Faterson]

Nope, JKenP, I assure you that is not the case. That is truly the final chapter and section in that particular e-book/EPUB file. Nothing follows on this chapter – that's it. Which is why I made the screenshot from this particular e-book and this particular chapter, because it illustrates quite drastically how untenable the current situation regarding page-counts in Marvin is. Whatever your particular position towards page-counts in e-books might be, I hope at least this much is clear: for an e-book app to claim, within the same footer, that a particular chapter is both 11 and 5 pages long at the same time, is simply unacceptable in the long run, if Kris's ambition is to present Marvin as top-quality e-reader software.

So I can see, JKenP, that you're only now beginning to grasp the gravity of the situation, which I'm happy about, because it justifies my having posted the screenshots above. And I kindly ask "the usual suspects" not to jump at me once again for having broached the page-count issue in "yet another thread". As can be seen above, we've arrived at discussing it quite naturally. The most recent Marvin version, 3.0.7, has just introduced this marked improvement of being able to view percentages with 2 decimals (and that's just fantastic, because I do read lots of e-books that are extremely long, and I could hardly track my progress in them with zero decimals in percentages), so talking about anything related to footers and headers (and page-counts are potential components of them) is perfectly legitimate in this thread. (Though I still maintain that the proper course of action would be to launch a dedicated page-count thread in Marvin's GitHub and redirect any future discussion of Marvin page-counts there.)

[JKenP]

No, it still lacks gravatas. I can see such concern in an academic text book. I don't care what number my page wants to call itself. I read for enjoyment/content and not math problems.

Pages numbers and a host of minor complaints here just make me feel sorry for Kris.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by JKenP

No, it still lacks gravatas. I can see such concern in an academic text book. I don't care what number my page wants to call itself. I read for enjoyment/content and not math problems.

Pages numbers and a host of minor complaints here just make me feel sorry for Kris.

Just a word of warning JKenP...it doesn't matter what you, or anyone says, Faterson will always think he is right. Even though he may occasionally have a point, he doesn't realize that the way he uses Marvin is NOT the way that 98% of users do...he actually uses that as an argument. "To be an outstanding ereader you MUST provide ME with all that I desire, exactly how I want it. You must cater to the 2%!" And he will continue along those lines regardless of what anyone, including Kris, says or does. If he truly wanted to just fix Marvin, he would submit his bug reports to Kris via email, like Kris requested. Instead, he would rather bloviate here...

Just a reminder....there is an "ignore" feature built in to MR...it works great!

[Faterson]

Originally Posted by JKenP

I don't care what number my page wants to call itself.

That's just your personal preference. You must know that a huge percentage of e-book readers does care about page numbers. If they didn't, Kris wouldn't have bothered to introduce page-numbering into Marvin in the first place. Instead of being dismissive about users' concerns, top-quality e-reader software caters to their needs. The solution I've been proposing would satisfy all Marvin users. What you or trololo Turtle are "proposing", would only gratify yourselves, while kicking all other users' behinds. I wonder which approach would be more reasonable to take for a software developer?!

[JKenP]

No, I don't know that a "huge percentage" want what you want. Based on the comments here, your premise goes unsupported. We don't know how many use Marvin. We can assume that it is a subset of that who visit the forum with a subset of those actually posting. And even with that, you appear a minority view.

The huge percentage are actually the silent majority -- fat, dumb, happy and silent.

Please quit trying to use unsupported data in your arguments.

[incumbent]

Enhancement Request: In-app analytics to see who is right so we can stop having the conversation.

[JSWolf]

The problem (as I see it) is that a lot of people do want page numbers. Marvin does not have page numbers that show you how long the book is and these page numbers need to NOT change when settings are changed.

Another long standing issue (has been asks for since Marvin had publisher mode) is that Marvin cannot display embedded fonts in Marvin's display mode.

[Turtle91]

Wow...just Wow!

Here is ANOTHER thread that has devolved to the page numbers argument.....


please. stop......or at least keep it isolated to a single thread about page numbers.