Koreader running on Kobos (all of them, hopefully!)

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

So, Epub is not an ebook format, it's a zipped HTML container.

I think PeterT was saying that calling PDB an ebook format would be like calling ZIP an ebook format. Yes, a lot of ebook formats use ZIP and some ebook readers can read (properly structured) ZIP files. But ZIP itself is much more generic.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by PeterT

No Ken; the point ius that a PDB can contain MANY MANY types of information; In the Palm world a PDB was a generic extension. The fact that many eBooks of that era were stored in PDBs does NOT make PDB an eBook format. That is what I am saying.

I could easilh send you a PDB that koreader would not be able to open.

And according to Kobo's content processing, I could send you plenty of EPUBs that the Kobo software won't open. Those of us with thousands of .pdb files that contain books, obtained most of them for their PDAs. Some of them came as "Secure eReader" files from Fictionwise or eReader.com.

Yes, technically .pdb files are Palm DataBase files, but practically the file type has made a place for itself as a format that you can find ebooks in.

Luck;
Ken

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

And according to Kobo's content processing, I could send you plenty of EPUBs that the Kobo software won't open. Those of us with thousands of .pdb files that contain books, obtained most of them for their PDAs. Some of them came as "Secure eReader" files from Fictionwise or eReader.com.

Yes, technically .pdb files are Palm DataBase files, but practically the file type has made a place for itself as a format that you can find ebooks in.

Luck;
Ken

And the odds are that those supposed ePubs would fail validation by tools designed to check ePubs.

Why the blazes do you have to be so antagonistic. All I was doing was attempting to educate people that PDB is NOT an actual eBook format.

[Ken Maltby]

Originally Posted by PeterT

And the odds are that those supposed ePubs would fail validation by tools designed to check ePubs.

Why the blazes do you have to be so antagonistic. All I was doing was attempting to educate people that PDB is NOT an actual eBook format.

I can't gage the odds of any particular epub passing the tests of any particular testing program, but I do know that whatever flaws they may have my other readers and reading programs have no trouble allowing me to read the books contained in the files. I don't consider Kobo's inability to read them as anything but poor error handling, for you to say that the files aren't good enough for kobo to be able to read them, while they can be read by other readers, smacks more of intolerance than of discernment.

Ok, lets say you have established that PDB is not an actual eBook format, what are the people you have so "educated" expected to do with that information? Are they supposed to believe that they should not buy or otherwise obtain an ebook file with the .pdb extension? Should they take you at your word and not expect there to be a viable ebook in such a file?
Or, as I suspect is your intent, are they to hold it as no short coming that the Kobo readers can't read ebooks from .pdb files? Where as the Koreader can.

If not taking your comment at face value, and disagreeing with what it implies makes me "antagonistic", so be it.

Luck;
Ken

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

And according to Kobo's content processing, I could send you plenty of EPUBs that the Kobo software won't open. Those of us with thousands of .pdb files that contain books, obtained most of them for their PDAs. Some of them came as "Secure eReader" files from Fictionwise or eReader.com.

Yes, technically .pdb files are Palm DataBase files, but practically the file type has made a place for itself as a format that you can find ebooks in.

While you can find epubs that will not process on the Kobo, can you find me even one epub that will not process on a Kobo AND will pass epub validation by FlightCrew and epubcheck? Inquiring minds are eager to know.

On another hand, I have quite a few .pdb files from the days when I owned a PalmPilot that are valid .pdbs but are not ebooks.

Originally Posted by Ken Maltby

I can't gage the odds of any particular epub passing the tests of any particular testing program, but I do know that whatever flaws they may have my other readers and reading programs have no trouble allowing me to read the books contained in the files. I don't consider Kobo's inability to read them as anything but poor error handling, for you to say that the files aren't good enough for kobo to be able to read them, while they can be read by other readers, smacks more of intolerance than of discernment.

I have found quite a few ebooks that my Kobo will not handle. I also found some of those files give me issues opening them with ADE, CoolReader and Calibre on my PCs, iBooks and the Kobo app on an iDevice and using a Nook ereader. Given that in most cases, a Kobo ereader does a more intensive scan through the file to generate the database entries, I am not surprised that they are more sensitive to poorly constructed epubs than are most devices/applications.

So these troublesome epubs of yours ... have you tried running FlightCrew or epubcheck on them before blaming Kobo? You have noticed that several sites such as SmashWords require your epub to pass epubcheck before they are accepted?

Regards,
David

[paola]

Originally Posted by BWinmill

The appreciation is nice, but giorgio130 and cgm999 and xor_ are the ones doing the hard work here so the biggest thank-you of all really ought to go to them! (My apologies if I missed a few of the heavy lifters here. The blame is mine for not following this thread more carefully.)

of course!!!

[Markismus]

Sometimes (2 out of 10) when I try to bring up the lower menu in the reader, it crashes back to the filemanager. When koreader_kobo.sh is executed from the terminal it says 'segmentation fault' and because of cgm999 while-do-done loop, reader.lua restarts.

Do others experience this too? Could this be because I've combined cgm999 mods with koreader version 273? Or does nobody experience this and do I just have to recopy all the files to the Kobo?

[muness]

Originally Posted by Markismus

What I did to get the dictionary working was:
...

Thanks for the instructions. I followed them, but how do I actually use the dictionary?

In koreader I have an epub open, and I click, double click, long hold on a word, but nothing happens. I don't see any reference to a dictionary in the top or bottom menus.

[muness]

Originally Posted by Markismus

Sometimes (2 out of 10) when I try to bring up the lower menu in the reader, it crashes back to the filemanager. When koreader_kobo.sh is executed from the terminal it says 'segmentation fault' and because of cgm999 while-do-done loop, reader.lua restarts.

Do others experience this too? Could this be because I've combined cgm999 mods with koreader version 273? Or does nobody experience this and do I just have to recopy all the files to the Kobo?

I don't remember experiencing such a crash.

[cgm999]

Hello,

I had this crashes also and untill I can figure why it happens, I've found that this temp workaround lowers the freq of crashes
Edit koreader_kobo.sh and before the reader.lua put this 2 lines:

exec 3<&-
ulimit -HSs unlimited

while :; do
LD_PRELOAD=/root/screenInv.so ./reader.lua /mnt/onboard
sleep 1
done

[Markismus]

@muness
1) Try opening a pdf-file. I use a scanned book with text underneath made in ABBYY Finereader. Epub doesn't work for me, too. (But in all fairness, I can easily switch to Nickel for that.) Only pictures of text in a pdf works, too.
2) Hold a word until it becomes white text on a black background. Let go and the dictionary entry should pop-up with as title the dictionary used, instead of the word entry.

Typical error: A horizontal bar effectively highlighting an entire sentence. Sometimes it is even two sentences down from where you pressed.
Work-around: Enable reflow.

--->>Sometimes I somehow am able to select multiple words. A pop-up menu tells me I can highlight or note(greyed out) and 2 other options, I forgot. Anybody knows how to reach that menu at will?<<---

[Markismus]

Originally Posted by cgm999

Hello,

I had this crashes also and untill I can figure why it happens, I've found that this temp workaround lowers the freq of crashes
Edit koreader_kobo.sh and before the reader.lua put this 2 lines:

exec 3<&-
ulimit -HSs unlimited

while :; do
LD_PRELOAD=/root/screenInv.so ./reader.lua /mnt/onboard
sleep 1
done

Now it hangs.
When I run "top" it gives: segmentation fault.
reboot.

I didn't get any crashes to Filemanager from the lower menu, though. The hangups are either from setting "Word Gap" to large (although sometimes it recovers after very long.) or from selecting a word for the dictionary.

Strangely enough these hangups seem random. Everything works like a charm after this last reboot. Rather unstable app we're running. I've reenabled the crash.log, hopefully it gives me some more info.

[Markismus]

I've used:
LD_PRELOAD=/root/screenInv.so ./reader.lua /mnt/onboard 2> crash.log

But crash.log remains 0 bytes!! Even when my Aura hang voor 3 hours at least. Should there not at least be info like "OCR Tesselation loaded", etc. messages in it, which you get in the shell when you ran koreader_kobo.sh from there?


(After I plugged in the USB and it rebooted spontaneously, I read for hours without problems a pdf-file in landscape with dictionary in German ).

Try:

LD_PRELOAD=/root/screenInv.so ./reader.lua /mnt/onboard > crash.log 2>&1

It won't give much more information, but sometimes it's enough to drop a vital hint.

[giorgio130]

You're missing a -d flag to get debug info, it should be reader.lua -d etc