FBReader for Maemo - new screenshots!

[rsperberg]

Misha,

I'm impressed with everything the FBReader has. On the Maemo developer list is information about adding fonts to the system, so I will be quite happy when I can install the font that I prefer to read text in.

The formats that people have requested seem all to come from the Palm world, but there's no Plucker Viewer for Windows, for instance, and I think this Palm orientation must leave out a lot of titles. I think MS Reader and Mobipocket formats are ruled out because of their proprietary nature, but you might want to look at eReader.

On a feature checklist of e-book readers, you have many features already checked off: fonts, rotation, place marker, library. I know you're planning bookmarks, which are essential. I think, too, that highlighting and annotation ought to be considered essential features for a complete e-book reader. I hope you will consider adding them.

Thank you,

Roger

Teleread (e-books: http://teleread.org/blog )
Electric Forest (digital libraries: http://altheim.com/ef )

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by doctorow

And if yes, could someone give me a tip how to run Maemo without owning the Nokia 770?

There's some information posted at http://topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/ . The piece there is about using Plucker in Maemo, so the circumstances are somewhat similar.

I downloaded the LiveCD image, then mounted it using the 45-day free trial of VirtualPC. Of course, the one difference here is that Plucker Viewer is included in the LiveCD and you will have to install FBReader. And presumably you'd have to do that each time you started things up. Or there are more sophisticated ways that are over my head or out of my experience.

Of course, if you are running Linux, it's a little more straightforward. At maemo.org are instructions for installing everything you need.

Roger

Teleread (e-books: http://teleread.org/blog )
Electric Forest (digital libraries: http://altheim.com/ef )

[doctorow]

Great help, Roger, thank you.

So for Maemo there is only a Live-CD availa ble, but not a standalone desktop distribution that would allow for permanent file system changes?

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by doctorow

So for Maemo there is only a Live-CD available, but not a standalone desktop distribution that would allow for permanent file system changes?

I've read that somebody actually installed the LiveCd on their hard-drive -- the way you can with knoppix, I guess. The information is somewhere in the maemo developer mail list archives. But other than that, no. Except, as I understand it, installing Maemo really means installing scratchbox on a linux machine, and at maemo.org are all the files needed for scratchbox to create the Maemo environment.

So maybe the answer to your question is a lot easier than we're assuming. Install Ubuntu or some other distro, install scratchbox, install the configuration files from Maemo, and you're off to the races. Of course, I'm not a linux guy, so I may have misunderstood things here.

Roger

[doctorow]

No problem. I am not a Linux geek either, but I have some spare boxes here where I can dedicate one for Maemo. So this is what I am going to do now

[rsperberg]

Sounds great.

Definitely do check the developer mailing list archives. Most of the problems you'll encounter will be described and their resolution explained there -- like for instance the weird but major gotcha of color depth. Nothing will work if the linux machine isn't set to 16-bit color depth, because that's what the 770 has. That sort of thing.

Good luck. And don't hesitate to ask your questions on that list -- the developers who have gone through it before are helpful in supplying answers.

Roger

[troyunverdruss]

I downloaded Lewis Carroll's "Game of Logic" from the online Gutenberg ebook database and viewed in in FBreader on the Nokia 770 (an actual one). I used the zipped up txt file. Everything looked great except for the beginning of the document where there is a text-based grid that shows the layout of the "game". For some reason all the spacing is smashed together so it looks like a few lines of gibberish instead of the neat grid that was in the text doc. When I view it on my desktop, the grid looks fine. I was hoping this might be the right place to let the developer know about this issue.

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by troyunverdruss

When I view it on my desktop, the grid looks fine. I was hoping this might be the right place to let the developer know about this issue.

When you say you viewed it on your desktop, I'm wondering whether you mean "viewed it in the Linux desktop version of FBReader" or "opened the text file in a text editor displaying the text in a mono-spaced font like New Courier."

The Project Gutenberg texts "format" things by ASCII characters (2 blank lines, 3 blanks lines, underscores around a word, that sort of thing) and by using spaces and a monospaced font to center or position text.

That's what was done with The Game of Logic. The diagrams are just bars and underscores (and letters and numbers) positioned by spaces.

Did you try the unzipped version to see what that looked like? I wonder if the compression of multiple consecutive spaces is what is generating the gibberish.

Roger

[lovebaby]

I installed FB reader on my Nokia 770 and can't get it to find an e-book?

I loaded two .pdb files (Plucker files, which I understand the program reads) onto my memory card. I then transferred the files (I tried both a ZIP file and the .pbd ) to Documents, but I can't find the files.

What directory do you set FB reader to look for Books? There is no My Docs directory as listed in the default directory? Do I create a certain directory in File mgr?

I've only had my Nokia 770 for 2 hours so I may be a little ignorant!!
Thanks

[troyunverdruss]

When I say that I opened it on my desktop, I mean in a text editor with a mono-spaced font and the grid worked/looked fine (not the linux desktop version of FBreader).

I just tried using the non-zipped version of that ebook and it had the same problem displaying the grid so I don't think that it's the compression that is causing the problem.

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by lovebaby

I loaded two .pdb files (Plucker files, which I understand the program reads) onto my memory card. I then transferred the files (I tried both a ZIP file and the .pbd ) to Documents, but I can't find the files.

What directory do you set FB reader to look for Books? There is no My Docs directory as listed in the default directory? Do I create a certain directory in File mgr?

I understand Misha is working on this, but I just read my files directly from the mmc card -- when I download them a file from the internet I store it there, rather than in Documents. And of course any files transferred from the PC go onto the mmc card. Actually, I have some files there, and some in a subfolder because I started to organize things and then forgot about it.

Hope you were able to get into the FBReader soon enough.

BTW, I didn't even stop to check that you are using the library Add book function to locate the file. You can't open a book unless it's in your library listing.

Also, I see any files with fb2, pdb, html, txt and zip extensions (easiest to put text and html files in a zip to keep them small.

[rsperberg]

Originally Posted by troyunverdruss

When I say that I opened it on my desktop, I mean in a text editor with a mono-spaced font and the grid worked/looked fine (not the linux desktop version of FBreader).

Well, unless you can post a screen capture that would show otherwise, I think you're just seeing the difference between mono-spaced and proportional-spaced fonts. Probably you already know that, but I'll say it for the record.

I tried applying FBReader formatting styles to plain text files like those from Project Gutenberg, and the reader didn't seem to recognize titles and section titles (but I only did a one-minute check, in one file).

There is a plain text reader now in beta designed specially for Project Gutenberg texts that uses logic to ascertain when a PG text file is starting a new chapter and what "paragraphs" are really titles and what words are italicized by surrounding underscores and so on. This is what the creator, who goes by the name bowerbird, terms zero markup language (and/or zen m.l., I haven't gotten it straight if these are two terms or one). So it's possible that the same sort of logic could be put into FBReader in order to format text files following the Format options.

And in that case, perhaps the "graphic" could be specified as requiring a monospaced font, and then it would appear perfectly, I predict.

I should add that bowerbird has apparently honed his algorithms to the nth degree, and moreover is not releasing them as open source, so I'm not saying FBReader would match what the beta zml reader would do with those PG texts. But the general outline of them is well-known, I would say.

I should also add that while bowerbird indicates he isn't averse to porting his c-coded reader to Maemo, there are many obstacles to getting it ported, so I wouldn't look for that reader on the 770 any time soon.