Version 5.4 (AI implementation)

[petrjahoda]

■ New features
- Reading Assistant: on an iPhone or iPad with Apple Intelligence, JustRead now helps you understand and remember what you read. Everything runs on your device, so nothing you read leaves it. It works with books in the languages Apple Intelligence supports, and you can turn it off in Settings › Reading.
- Explain: select a word or passage and tap Explain for a short, plain explanation. Each book keeps its explanations, so you can look back at them later.
- Who's This?: select a character's name in an EPUB book, and Explain tells you who they are, using only the pages you have read so far.
- Catch Me Up: in an EPUB book, get a recap of where you left off and of the story so far. It is offered when you open a book after a week or more away, and you can always open it from Book Details.
- Highlights Digest: the Reading Assistant sums up the key ideas in your highlights and notes. Find it in the menu of Highlights & Notes.
- On iPad, the reader's popovers are redesigned: one size for all of them, chapter lengths and pages left in Contents, Newest or Book Order in Bookmarks and Highlights, highlight cards with the words around each passage, and a strip in Search that shows where the matches fall in the book. The Sleep Timer can also stop at the End of Chapter.
- In PDFs, your highlights show in the page thumbnails, and links open with a quick tap.
- Set Series: select books in the Library and tap Series to put them into one series, numbered in order.
- Tags from Columns, in the Calibre source's settings, turns custom columns such as fandoms into tags.
- Saved Words can join the reader's toolbar: touch and hold the toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar.

■ Improvements
- Book servers on plain http:// now connect from anywhere, for example over Tailscale, ZeroTier or a dynamic DNS address, not only on your home network.
- With a filter on in the Library, Add Books, Edit and Send to Calibre stay available. Send to Calibre also offers Send All Books.
- Show Covers Only now also hides the series badge.
- The Library's selection bar is redesigned, with Read and Unread in one control and a Series button.
- Recently Added and Recently Changed use Calibre's dates for books from Calibre.
- Books from Calibre now take their series and number from the server, and PDFs read the series Calibre embeds in their metadata.
- Very large books, made of thousands of files, open and respond much faster.

■ Fixes
- Fixed crashes in Read Aloud, the dictionary, reading reminders, searching in a book, and when resizing the app on iPad.
- With Font set to Original, books that use different fonts in different sections now show each section in its own font, instead of one fallback font throughout.
- Searching a server's books no longer closes the keyboard while nothing matches yet, for example while typing in Pinyin.
- The app icon's edges are no longer jagged on the Home Screen.
- A book is no longer in Up Next and Finished at the same time.
- Background listening now plays from where you left off.
- Search results and highlight previews no longer drop the spaces between words.
- On iPad, tapping outside a reader popover no longer turns the page.
- Highlights imported from other PDF apps now cover just their text.
- Comics and audiobooks without a title in their metadata show their file name instead of Unknown.

■ Localization
- All new text is natively translated across all 20 supported languages.

[gustophersmob]

I have to admit to being very skeptical of AI in everything, especially a reading app. I guess it’s good it stays on device, and I’m assuming by turning it off it’s not just hidden but no longer running in the background?

[petrjahoda]

It is turned off by default. And it uses Apple Intelligence, so if you do not have it or turned it off, it is even not available in JustRead.

[culytera]

In my attempts to figure out why JustRead is still showing the numbers in a "misaligned" way for some fonts, I finally learned about text figures. You can see in my comparison and screen recording how the numbers display differently depending on the value for the CSS property font-variant-numeric.

I edited the attached comparison using Affinity and its text tool also lets the user edit the figure style so I showed how the numbers would look in lining/line figures and old style/text figures if the font supports them. Interestingly, Verdana in my system supports the old style/text figures.

The default in JustRead seems to be to show them in text figures if they're supported by the font. Fonts like Charter, Libron, Avenir (not Avenir Next and Avenir Condensed) don't seem to support those so by default they only show the numbers in lining figures. In version 5.3, turning off Publisher Style used to display them in lining figures. In version 5.4, the numbers will display in text figures whether Publisher Style is on or off.

Other references:

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...figures-in-css
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures

If displaying the numbers in text figures by default is deliberate and I'm the only user who prefers seeing them in lining figures, then I'll just suck it up. I'm not sure it's worth having a toggle for something like that.

On a positive note, I like the font used as the "default" now compared to before.

[petrjahoda]

Hello and thanks for the comparison and the test book.

The old-style figures weren't a deliberate choice: the reading engine we use sets them for every book by default, and a fix in 5.4 for another font feature (Fast Serif for bionic reading) stopped hiding that when Publisher Style is off.

The next update 5.6 will show each font's own default numbers in both modes, and a book that asks for a specific number style still gets it.
So Noto Sans and Merriweather will show lining figures again, no toggle needed.

Thank you for your patience and hard work on this.