Onyx Boox M90 available

[Dulin's Books]

Sure.

There are two separate functions; "Annotate" and "Notes".

To Annonate
select the menu
select annotations
select add annotate

Highlight a selection with the pen. When you lift the pen the "notes" box pops up with the keyboard. Type or write(using handwriting recognition that turns it into typed text) what you want to say/remember about this selection.

The highlight remains when done. Anywhere in the text if you open the menu, select annotations and then all annotations, you can see a list of the notes you made and on what page the highlight appears. You can select them to jump to that page.

If you don't make any remarks about the highlight/annotation it will still appear in the "All Annotations" list with the page number and you will be able to jump to it. These highlights are stored in the database/.SKETCH file. basically the size of the highlight is stored and the .SKETCH includes location information for where it should be. If you did make remarks they are also stored in the .SKETCH file

To make Notes

From the PDF

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Mark

Now make your selection by Highlighting the line etc that you want.

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Copy

Exit the PDF. Go to the main menu.

Select Notes
Select Create Note
Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Paste

Now you can type or write as above to makes notes about your selection.

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Save

If you try to close it you will be asked to save it and give it a title. This is now saved as a .txt file in the "text editor" folder

[sarah11918]

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

forgot Snapshot

these are stored on the SD card in the "snapshot" folder which is created the first time yo take a screenshot

Well that's encouraging. I could save the png file, print as pdf and opening the file seemed to be a full-sized pdf image. So at least pdfs can be created on a one-at-a-time basis using Snapshot.

That's very helpful, thanks.

[PF4Mobile]

Thanks a lot Dulin

From what you are saying I understand that in fact it is possible not to leave the PDF after highlighting text

Now make your selection by Highlighting the line etc that you want.

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Copy

After this I would prefer to paste the text in a note attached to the highlight.
Is this possible?

With this I am trying to determine if it is possible to emulate/mimic the functionality that many PDF readers have on the desktop, that is, when you highlight text you can choose that text to be automatically copied in a note.
On the desktop I export the notes form PDF files
With M90, if the above work, you already have your text in an SQLLite database and you can easily get that info in a text file or anything else.

Can you please confirm if the above sequence is possible?
Thanks for your patience :-)
PF

Originally Posted by Dulin's Books

Sure.

There are two separate functions; "Annotate" and "Notes".

To Annonate
select the menu
select annotations
select add annotate

Highlight a selection with the pen. When you lift the pen the "notes" box pops up with the keyboard. Type or write(using handwriting recognition that turns it into typed text) what you want to say/remember about this selection.

The highlight remains when done. Anywhere in the text if you open the menu, select annotations and then all annotations, you can see a list of the notes you made and on what page the highlight appears. You can select them to jump to that page.

If you don't make any remarks about the highlight/annotation it will still appear in the "All Annotations" list with the page number and you will be able to jump to it. These highlights are stored in the database/.SKETCH file. basically the size of the highlight is stored and the .SKETCH includes location information for where it should be. If you did make remarks they are also stored in the .SKETCH file

To make Notes

From the PDF

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Mark

Now make your selection by Highlighting the line etc that you want.

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Copy

Exit the PDF. Go to the main menu.

Select Notes
Select Create Note
Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Paste

Now you can type or write as above to makes notes about your selection.

Select Menu
Select Tools
Select Save

If you try to close it you will be asked to save it and give it a title. This is now saved as a .txt file in the "text editor" folder

[jian1]

big question.... how do you upgrade the firmware on m90? I have donwloaded the 1.5.1 and unzipped... seems to contain helle of bunch of files.... and the upgrade procedure is for m60 stated in the manual. very confusing..

the m90 firmware package also contains some subdirectories such as handwriting, fonts, & tts

[jian1]

whenever I open a Chinese PDF file, it's totally blank. English PDF seems to be ok. why is this?

[Larrie]

On my M90, the TTS does not seem to work at all. Anyone tried this function?

[jian1]

it seems that the firmware is soooo buggy.....

some of my Chinese PDFs can't be displayed properly, some larger english PDF can't be flipped pages at all.

Dictionary is almost useless as it failed to grab words properly.

Forget about handwriting.... the way it responds is totally out of whack.

web browsing is a joke, as it's extremely difficult to input a searching phrase, forget about logging into your gmail account.

punctuation position is very funny for TXT file.

Can't believe how silly the firmware is.

[Dulin's Books]

For Chinese Language PDFs have you gone in to the menu and changed the encoding?

i used the browser yesterday to come here and download two pdfs - alice in wonderland and the federalist papers. I also logged in to my gmail account and read some emails. besides the normal issue of it being browsing with eink what trouble did you have?

i havent spent much time with the dictionary but it could always be improved. there are other dictionaries you can use as well but that is a topic that should have its own thread.

i made several hand written notes to those pdfs for examples and tried teh scribble function on its own. they do need to calibrate the touch layer a little as its missing an area that i would think could be covered by the sensor. make sure you have calibrated the stylus input in the settings menu.

when updating you put the update file in the root of your SD card. the other folders should also be placed on your SD card. if you already have them on your SD card then you should update the contents of those folders with any new items from the folders in the update package. they might include new fonts, tts voices, dictionaries etc.

make sure the device is off. make sure the update file is in the root of the SD card. put the SD card in the device. click and hold down the IR sensor(this is the ok/select button) . keep it held down and turn on the device. when the screen displays the message about checking for updates you can release the button. Make sure you do this with a mostly full battery or while plugged in to power. The device will update and reboot.

[jian1]

Ok, I will elaborate the problems a bit more, for it's critical to have Onyx update the buggy firmware.

I got the device yesterday and initial firmware was almost unusable, it barely flips page when I asked it to, and failed to browse WWW to the slightest.

After I upgraded firmware 1.5.1, then I can read PDFs without much struggles, but large PDF files can not be displayed properly. One more thing to correct, it's not the device can't browse Chinese PDFs, it was the Chinese PDF I had is too large (over 30M) to be displayed.... any large PDFs (larger than 15M I assumed) will be displayed with total blank pages after pages.

The dictionary is always joke..and I am NOT blaming the dictionary itself, but the way it grabs words. It never grab the word properly by missing one last letter which sometimes threw the dictionary into confusion. The dictionary itself is ok.

Annotation doesn't work always, sometimes there's nothing poping up after I have selected the word. and clicking some letters never got displayed properly, and the response is wayyyyy tooooo slow... I understand e-ink is slow by it's nature, but 10 seconds delay isn't acceptable.

The scribbling feature is a joke, I spent 1 hour to erase something I scribbled... I had calibrated it to the best precision.

Web browser has terrible interactive problem. you click a link it doesn't work and you thought yourself might not clicking it properly, and tried again, suddenly, the device seems waking up and accepted all the clicks you've made, jumping the web page back and forth... I tried gmail, doesn't work, and tried some forum I went on a lot, the log-in is a pain in the ass as the soft keyboards doesn't work as intended. The web browsing overally is the worst I have experienced so far on M90.

Doc, chm, txt files aren't supported too well.. punctuation shown at wrong place in txt. Can barely read some sophisticated office doc files.

But I am patient enough to wait for improvements. The first priority Onyx should put into is supporting for large PDF files as I got tons of academic books to read which lots of over 30Megabytes. then, the scribbling/annotation feature of that, and maybe responding time... The rest can be made lower priorities.

ETA: music score PDFs ain't supported very well, some part of it isn't legible.

[forcheville]

Raster PDFs, eg PDFs made from scans, have a slow page-turn of >=6 seconds typically on medium large files 5MB+ on the M90.

The cure for this is to convert them to DjVu. Files end up very much smaller with no significant loss of quality, and page turn if not instant, is gapless and smooth. OCR can be easily incorporated into the DjVu for text searching. PDF to DjVu conversion is pretty fast and easy with a number of free utilities.
The DjVu page turn speed is probably fast enough for music.

I've noticed that some epubs, commonly commercial ones, default to two column display when the font is below a certain size. This is quite a nice look for many books, like a newspaper or magazine layout. Epubs that don't have a suitable page format sheet in the Styles directory won't do this. It's pretty easy to add it in if you copy the relevant style info over from one book to another, and make suitable adaptions in the html headers. ("Book conjugation" this should be called, on analogy with bacteria.)

[jian1]

Originally Posted by forcheville

Raster PDFs, eg PDFs made from scans, have a slow page-turn of >=6 seconds typically on medium large files 5MB+ on the M90.

The cure for this is to convert them to DjVu. Files end up very much smaller with no significant loss of quality, and page turn if not instant, is gapless and smooth. OCR can be easily incorporated into the DjVu for text searching. PDF to DjVu conversion is pretty fast and easy with a number of free utilities.
The DjVu page turn speed is probably fast enough for music.

I've noticed that some epubs, commonly commercial ones, default to two column display when the font is below a certain size. This is quite a nice look for many books, like a newspaper or magazine layout. Epubs that don't have a suitable page format sheet in the Styles directory won't do this. It's pretty easy to add it in if you copy the relevant style info over from one book to another, and make suitable adaptions in the html headers. ("Book conjugation" this should be called, on analogy with bacteria.)

I also noticed that PDFs on SD card has slower flipping rate than the ones locally. Does it mean I have to copy everything on SD card over?

[PF4Mobile]

Originally Posted by forcheville

Raster PDFs, eg PDFs made from scans, have a slow page-turn of >=6 seconds typically on medium large files 5MB+ on the M90.

The cure for this is to convert them to DjVu. Files end up very much smaller with no significant loss of quality, and page turn if not instant, is gapless and smooth. OCR can be easily incorporated into the DjVu for text searching. PDF to DjVu conversion is pretty fast and easy with a number of free utilities.
The DjVu page turn speed is probably fast enough for music.

I've noticed that some epubs, commonly commercial ones, default to two column display when the font is below a certain size. This is quite a nice look for many books, like a newspaper or magazine layout. Epubs that don't have a suitable page format sheet in the Styles directory won't do this. It's pretty easy to add it in if you copy the relevant style info over from one book to another, and make suitable adaptions in the html headers. ("Book conjugation" this should be called, on analogy with bacteria.)

Yes but then you loose all the PDF annotations advantages that everybody is fighting for. Am I wrong? I am not a DJVu user.
I believe some of us, if not most, want to be able to annotate the PDFs and export them for further processing or to forward them to other persons

[PF4Mobile]

Originally Posted by jian1

I also noticed that PDFs on SD card has slower flipping rate than the ones locally. Does it mean I have to copy everything on SD card over?

What class is your SD card?
It might be a slower card, try a faster one.

[eLiNK]

Originally Posted by forcheville

Raster PDFs, eg PDFs made from scans, have a slow page-turn of >=6 seconds typically on medium large files 5MB+ on the M90.

That should and can be significantly improved.
I've got a 30 MB pdf made from scans and the page turns are under 1 second on KDXG. It is made with the help of ClearScan from Acrobat, though.

[eLiNK]

Originally Posted by PF4Mobile

Yes but then you loose all the PDF annotations advantages that everybody is fighting for. Am I wrong? I am not a DJVu user.
I believe some of us, if not most, want to be able to annotate the PDFs and export them for further processing or to forward them to other persons

Was it not somewhere announced that Djvu annotations are also possible on M90?

Would be surprised myself if it is, as I know of no Windows tool that does annotation in djvu files.