Cybook for a week and conversations with Pauline (from Bookeen)

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

do you mean that it doesn't notice a closing italic tag, and continues to italicise the text ? what do you mean by italic mode ?

Precisely. My apologies for not being fully descriptive...

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

i did eventually manage to make a really nice .prc edition, by starting from the .opf file created by convertLit, so now i have a beautiful mobi book, perfectly formatted, with all the images and every special character, when i preview it in the pc mobipocket reader. yay ! BUT, when i transfer the book to the cybook, arg !! a lot of the special characters disappear !!! and i have those stupid blank squares instead. i thought, maybe the font i am using is not complete, so i charged Times New Roman (i don't think there is a glyph in the world which is not represented in TNR). still those squares. so, it must come from the firmware, which only supports a partial charset. and frankly i find that very disappointing. it would be really nice to have that fixed in a firmware update.

Is the encoding set correctly in the .opf and .html files (and therefore in the .prc)? It should probably be utf-8. I think MobiPocket also does some in-line translation of (mis-coded?) special characters in the Desktop Reader, because I have seen some cases where FBReader gives squares but MobiPocket does not. I can't recall if this was fixable in FBReader by changing the encoding or not.

Another issue is that Desktop MR will override your font choice if it has to in order to get all the ranges of UTF-8 it needs. FBReader only uses one font at a time (exactly the one you select), so it may be a better test for what will happen on the Gen3. A free font with good coverage (but not to everyones taste) is Deja Vu Sans.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

I'm impressed that you got any text at all in-line with an image. I can't recall another example where MobiPocket did even this well. Given that Mobipocket does not float text around images, it is usually best to center the image - which MobiPocket does not do by default.

ha, ok. well now i know. that's rather disappointing, and another really good reason to step up the html support (why no images at all ??? that's just crazy). plus, it's completely useless if, as is the case in this book, you have illuminated first capitals at the start of each chapter.

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Yep. Bookeen hasn't quite got all the bugs out of its HTML handling. And I've learned to live with the quirks of .mobi on Cybook vs .mobi on the PC - which one would presume did not need to happen given that Bookeen should be working from the Mobipocket SDK.

Derek

yes, there is still some work to do on html handling, but some of the html strangeness comes from mobipocket as well ; for example, the rss feeds it picks up, apparently don't include any images. that seems strange to me. and when creating a .prc book from html, clearly there are some things i have not understood yet...

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Precisely. My apologies for not being fully descriptive...

that's what i thought you meant, it was pretty clear, but i did notice in the menu you could make all the text bold so i thought i should be sure it wasn't something like that, and i just hadn't noticed that function.

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Is the encoding set correctly in the .opf and .html files (and therefore in the .prc)? It should probably be utf-8. I think MobiPocket also does some in-line translation of (mis-coded?) special characters in the Desktop Reader, because I have seen some cases where FBReader gives squares but MobiPocket does not. I can't recall if this was fixable in FBReader by changing the encoding or not.

Another issue is that Desktop MR will override your font choice if it has to in order to get all the ranges of UTF-8 it needs. FBReader only uses one font at a time (exactly the one you select), so it may be a better test for what will happen on the Gen3. A free font with good coverage (but not to everyones taste) is Deja Vu Sans.

ok, i will have to check all that information !! i don't have fbreader, so i'll have to find that and install it to test with.

as for the encoding though, i would think yes it is correctly encoded, since if it were a question of incorrect encoding, the characters should have been missing in the desktop reader also, right ? but they display fine there, they are only missing when i look at the book on the cybook.

anyway i'll check out Deja vu sans, but for the body of the text i prefer a serif font, do you have a recommendation for that ? i honestly like georgia quite well and use it myself frequently, so it's not too important unless there is a different one with more characters available.

thanks everybody for all your help !! i'm trying to explore as much as possible in such a short time and it's great to benefit from your experience !!

[tompe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

as for the encoding though, i would think yes it is correctly encoded, since if it were a question of incorrect encoding, the characters should have been missing in the desktop reader also, right ? but they display fine there, they are only missing when i look at the book on the cybook.

I would not draw that conclusion withour more checking. The font on the desktop reader maybe cover mores charaters in WIndows coding then the Cybook. I would run mobi2mobi on the file and see that it is utf-8 tagged. I would also run mobi2html and check that the characters really are utf-8 and that the html file works in a browser.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by tompe

I would not draw that conclusion withour more checking. The font on the desktop reader maybe cover mores charaters in WIndows coding then the Cybook. I would run mobi2mobi on the file and see that it is utf-8 tagged. I would also run mobi2html and check that the characters really are utf-8 and that the html file works in a browser.

well, i just re-opened my opf source file in mobipocket creator, and under book settings it does say the encoding is UTF-8. and the html works beautifully in a browser, i checked that when i was trying to make the original .imp file a long time ago. and if i check the meta tags in the html source, it says charset utf8. so that all seems fine. is it worth checking any more ? i don't want to look into mobi2mobi right now, but i might later when i have a bit more time. is it a perl program ? if yes, does it have a windows binary ?

[tompe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

well, i just re-opened my opf source file in mobipocket creator, and under book settings it does say the encoding is UTF-8. and the html works beautifully in a browser, i checked that when i was trying to make the original .imp file a long time ago. and if i check the meta tags in the html source, it says charset utf8. so that all seems fine. is it worth checking any more ? i don't want to look into mobi2mobi right now, but i might later when i have a bit more time. is it a perl program ? if yes, does it have a windows binary ?

Yes, it has Windows binaries. But since mobipocket createor says utf-8 it should be OK I suppose.

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

one of the key features for me, is the formats supported natively (without conversion). ideally, i would like to read html files, and some text formats like .txt, .rtf, maybe even .doc). the most important to me is html, for several reasons.

it's an open format, which i think should remain accessible pretty much forever. i can't imagine a day when html will become so obsolete that it would not be possible to decode it anywhere, unlike, for example, the .imp format, which is completely closed (cannot be converted into anything else)).

it's a format which can show any character, as long as you have an appropriate font.

with css rules, you can give styles to the text to create really beautiful books which are a pleasure to the eyes. just because we appreciate the convenience of digital reading, doesn't mean we should give up the pleasure of a beautifully laid out text.

html, normally, can also handle images, so you can make illustrated books.

luckily, the cybook already supports several of these formats, including html. brilliant ! however, a few oddities : the text displays perfectly, but not the images ! not at all. you can see that in the photos i posted a few posts back : the two liseuses are showing the same text, an illustrated version of Three men in a boat. but, on the cybook, no illustrations. it's really a shame, for the illuminated first letters in particular ! i tried putting the illustrations in a sub-folder next to the html file, i tried putting all the images on the same level as the html in one folder, i tried putting them in a .zip (you never know)... nothing doing. so there are still some elements of html to implement, and i think this should be priority for a future update.

another problem, but a mobipocket problem this time : i sent the same html file thorugh the mobipocket creator, to resolve the problem of the missing images. ok, the images are there now, but my nicely formatted text with images floated inline left and right, is all broken : the text does not wrap correctly. i've made some screen caps to illustrate this : to the left, the .imp file (native eb1150 format, which is based on very early html), to the right, the same source html file, converted with mobipocket creator and displayed in the pc mobi reader. you can see the images are not at all where they belong.

this could be because i don't have much experience with mobipocket : don't hesitate to tell me if there is a way to do this.

ok, now it's dinnertime, so more later...

OK .... I'm a little confused. I see illustrations in both examples. Granted the cybook is not positioning the illustration to it's best advantage, but I do see an illustration.

[zelda_pinwheel]

in the first photos i posted, back here.

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

in the first photos i posted, back here.

Oh .... ok. I knew there had to be a rational explanation.

[nekokami]

Great review, Z-chan! Bookeen is getting their money's worth by loaning you this lovely little liseuse. I think they should let you keep it.

Have you tried night-time reading with a small light yet? That's when I find the lower page contrast of eink gives me some trouble. If you don't normally have someone trying to sleep next to you when you read, go visit a cousin or something.

Eink can't be backlit for technical reasons, but some other form of integrated lighting (e.g. a wedge light) sure would be nice.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Great review, Z-chan! Bookeen is getting their money's worth by loaning you this lovely little liseuse. I think they should let you keep it.

hey, me too ! from your lips, to bookeen's ear...

Have you tried night-time reading with a small light yet? That's when I find the lower page contrast of eink gives me some trouble. If you don't normally have someone trying to sleep next to you when you read, go visit a cousin or something.

Eink can't be backlit for technical reasons, but some other form of integrated lighting (e.g. a wedge light) sure would be nice.

well, i like to read in bed, but i use a lamp for that. i do notice the difference with the eb1150, but since i try to keep the backlight as low as possible on that (it hurts my eyes), i haven't had any trouble.

[nekokami]

But you see, to get the proper experience, you need to have someone next to you in bed tossing and turning and asking how late you're planning on staying up reading.

My beloved has started sleeping with an eye mask because even the relatively small light I use when reading at night keeps him awake. This morning it apparently got stuck to his lashes due to allergies.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by nekokami

But you see, to get the proper experience, you need to have someone next to you in bed tossing and turning and asking how late you're planning on staying up reading.

well, i'm working on that part... i'll see what i can do. for test purposes, i mean.

My beloved has started sleeping with an eye mask because even the relatively small light I use when reading at night keeps him awake. This morning it apparently got stuck to his lashes due to allergies.

arg ! don't you just love allergies ? tell him it could be worse : he could need earplugs, to block out the infernal noise of a pack of shums. and if you were reading a paper book, think of all the rustling as you turn pages !!

[nekokami]

I think the audible clicking of the page turn bar on the iLiad does disturb him sometimes, though.

If Bookeen decides to have a picnic (great idea to show off the sunlight-readable screens), you might want to distribute Mobileread buttons or something.

http://cafepress.com/mobileread

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

well, i'm working on that part... i'll see what i can do. for test purposes, i mean.

I am willing to heroically sacrifice myself in the interests of science, if you want a volunteer!