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

[eureka]

Originally Posted by chrox

Someone has reported that KPVBooklet works fine in 5.1.2 with djvu and epub documents. But it cannot be confirmed by myself since I don't have a KT device. Probably you can also fix it by updating your Kindle to 5.3.2. As far as I know KPVBooklet works better in 5.3.X firmware.

It might be me reported. But KPVBooklet didn't work as-is in 5.1.2, I've needed to apply some adjustments (listed in linked post). Also obfuscation in new firmwares, including 5.3.2 for KT, changes Java classes' names in every new firmware version, so I doubt that KPVBooklet will work as-is in 5.3.2 (but I didn't check).

UPD Ah, I see KPVBooklet made nice progress and declares to support KT 5.1.2 out of box. Great, thanks!

[tommytomtom]

Kindle hangs at startup and reboots all the time.
What I did:
Updating to 5.3.2 worked after uninstalling JBPatch. Maybe the Collection Manager setup was the problem, but who knows. Then I could open a djvu, but after opening the titlepage, the djvureader crashed immediately and I returned to the homescreen. So I thought just to reinstall it. So I deleted the KindlePDFViewer folder and copied the uninstallation bin of KPVBooklet into the kindle's root directory and updated the kindle. Probably the other way arround would have been the smarter move. However, the uninstallation went successfully.
Now however, the kindle does not start anymore. I can see the man under the tree and the white progress bar goes have the way for three times before the kindle restarts. After removing DUOKAN_DISABLE, I can enter Duokan but after switching to Kindle OS the same thing happens all over. Since the new firmware does not allow to easily enter diag_mode I don't know what to do. Any ideas?

[chrox]

Originally Posted by eureka

It might be me reported. But KPVBooklet didn't work as-is in 5.1.2, I've needed to apply some adjustments (listed in linked post). Also obfuscation in new firmwares, including 5.3.2 for KT, changes Java classes' names in every new firmware version, so I doubt that KPVBooklet will work as-is in 5.3.2 (but I didn't check).

Yes. I have already add the mentioned fix into KPVBooklet otherwise additional file types cannot show up in the home screen for Kindle touch. And I enumerate all ContentCatalog's declared methods and check their parameter types to find out the obfuscated query method in runtime. This enumeration approach works fine on all firmware above 5.1.2 in spite of the obfuscation. I hope it will also work on earlier firmware of version 5 but I can't test it.

[tommytomtom]

Great! Finally after flashing back to 5.1.2, installing it worked (am at 5.3.2, now). however, the screen rotation does not work! so when landscape mode is activated, change any settings does not work because the position of clicking are wrong! so only portrait mode works. that is a real pity because pdfs and djvus normally have to be read in landscape mode with fit to width because they are simply way to small in portrait mode. furthermore it is unfortunate that other zoom options are not possible.
Still having djvu support is truly amazing!!! Thanks to everybody who was and is working on it!

[dave2008]

Good to know your kindle is working again

The new version is not even a beta release, it just happened that many people found the secret download page ;p

So many of the features are still under development. We will put on an announcement when the first release is out. Actually it will probably be a new thread because we will get a new name. Welcome everyone to join the brainstorming BTW:
https://github.com/hwhw/kindlepdfviewer/issues/705

[dracodoc]

Originally Posted by dracodoc

I have a question, the rifont that responsible for reading position info seemed only recognize the font under host, i.e. the kindle fonts. I placed some fonts under the fonts directory, they can be found in tfont which is for filemanager, but cannot be found by rifont.

How can I make my fonts available for rifont?

I found this is caused by the conflict between fonthack and kpv font path.
https://github.com/hwhw/kindlepdfviewer/wiki/Usage-Tips
font setting trap for fonthack users

[TheWizard]

I just started using the "secret github download" build on my Paperwhite - awesome! I have tons of scanned manuals in PDF and DjVu to test with.

Only bug I've found is that the "Go To" jump bar doesn't work. It's just a thin straight line and touching it doesn't do anything. I'm not sure if you devs are already aware of it or if that's just an artifact of my days-old build. Standard page turns, bookmarks, and Home Screen progress are all working, very slick.

KPVBooklet is very cool too, turned out very nice.

Thanks for this great work!

[thomass]

For some PDFs some Turkish characters (ğ,ş,İ,) are missing when I try to display it on Kindle using KPV. I suppose this is related with the font. How can I use a diferent font to display this characters correctly?

[hawhill]

Ah, that's a difficult one. The font is not embedded, but specified as being "TimesNewRoman". Thus, a "Times" variant font will be used - and unfortunately, it doesn't have the right characters present. We ship the "Ghostscript" variant of the PDF base fonts, and of course you can replace them. However, they are in a slightly exotic format. So it is not easy unfortunately, and the font file names are hardcoded. But you can give a try to replace them by, say, a renamed variant of a Times font that does have those characters.

I'm not entirely sure if that will fix it, though. Getting from character info to a specific glyph in a font has become a bit overwhelming since the days of ASCII code pages...

[dave2008]

Originally Posted by TheWizard

I just started using the "secret github download" build on my Paperwhite - awesome! I have tons of scanned manuals in PDF and DjVu to test with.

Only bug I've found is that the "Go To" jump bar doesn't work. It's just a thin straight line and touching it doesn't do anything. I'm not sure if you devs are already aware of it or if that's just an artifact of my days-old build. Standard page turns, bookmarks, and Home Screen progress are all working, very slick.

KPVBooklet is very cool too, turned out very nice.

Thanks for this great work!

Good to know that this pre-beta version works for you

The goto bar is just a place holder to remind us to implement that feature.

[Kai771]

Originally Posted by thomass

For some PDFs some Turkish characters (ğ,ş,İ,) are missing when I try to display it on Kindle using KPV. I suppose this is related with the font. How can I use a diferent font to display this characters correctly?

Instead of fiddling with fonts in KPV, maybe it would be much easier to embed fonts in your pdf? One way to do this (on a Linux box) is to use this:

$ gs -o TurkishCharacterTest-new.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress TurkishCharacterTest.pdf

You'll need ghostscript installed for this, but I think it's installed by default on most distros.

If you use windows, I'd suggest you to install VirtualBox, and some Linux distro as a virtual machine. Having access to a Linux box is quite handy, and fortunatelly, today's computers have so much disk space that you won't even notice it's there .

Someone might suggest that there's a ghostscript for windows too, but I'd still recomend you to keep a Linux VM .

Now, about the line above: I didn't come up with this myself. I got it from here, and simplified it a bit. If you look at the original version, you'll see that there's -sFONTPATH option, that would allow you to specify the locations where the fonts are. I didn't use this, and it automatically replaced Arial with Helvetica and Times New Roman with NimbusRomNo9L on my Ubuntu 12.04 VM.

You'll notice that the resulting file is noticeably smaller. I didn't use this before. I was intrigued by your post and did a bit of research. This might not work for all files. But I think you might find it useful anyway.

I hope it helps.

A version of your file after I ran this command is attached bellow.

Regards,
Kai771

[thomass]

Originally Posted by Kai771

Instead of fiddling with fonts in KPV, maybe it would be much easier to embed fonts in your pdf? One way to do this (on a Linux box) is to use this:..

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have Debian on VB, will try to use this.

I tried your output on Touch KPV, but it quits KPV as soon as it opens the document. but the text seems OK for this really short time.

Originally Posted by hawhill

But you can give a try to replace them by, say, a renamed variant of a Times font that does have those characters.

Thanks for the help. I couldn't decide on which font to replace with TimesNewRoman. kindlepdfviewer\frontend\ui\font.lua has no info about the font which is used for the content. On KPV there are NimbusMonL, NimbusRomNo9L, NimbusSanL, StandardSymL, Dingbats ,DroidSans .

[Kai771]

Originally Posted by thomass

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have Debian on VB, will try to use this.

I tried your output on Touch KPV, but it quits KPV as soon as it opens it. but text seems OK for this really short time.

Strange, it works fine on my K3. I tried both last official release, kindlepdfviewer-v2012.11.zip and more recent kindlepdfviewer-cache-fix.zip version. But obviously, they're different than touch version.

This probably won't be of any help to you, but I also first tried replacing the fonts. I took times.ttf, timesi.ttf, timesbd.ttf, timesbi.ttf from my Win7 box, converted them to .cff using http://www.freefontconverter.com/, renamed them to NimbusRomNo9L* (since that's the font similar to Times) - but only got empty page in KPV.

Edit: Correction, first I just tried copying above mentioned .ttf files to fonts folder. That didn't have any effect.

Regards,
Kai771

Edit: Screenshot attached.

[thomass]

Originally Posted by Kai771

This probably won't be of any help to you, but I also first tried replacing the fonts. I took times.ttf, timesi.ttf, timesbd.ttf, timesbi.ttf from my Win7 box, converted them to .cff using http://www.freefontconverter.com/, renamed them to NimbusRomNo9L* (since that's the font similar to Times) - but only got empty page in KPV.

really appreciated, thanks anyway.
I've just tried the latest build for Touch, no luck.

[Kai771]

@thomass

I tried running the gs command on Windows box, using gswin64c.exe. I specified -sFONTPATH=C:\WINDOWS\Fonts. Now the file is a lot larger . This also works fine on my K3. Try if it works for you.

It might be interesting to notice that when I didn't specify -sFONTPAPTH in windows, it said that it also replaced Times with Nimbus, but the resulting file didn't show (ğ,ş,İ,) when I opened it in windows (I use Foxit Reader), so I didn't bother testing that on K3.

Regards,
Kai771