The Grand Experiment!

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by gregcd

Hi daffy
thats a nice screen capture there, howd you do it?

It's one of the settings in PRSPlus. You can choose which keys to press for a capture. I use the volume up key since I don't listen to music on my ebook readers. You can also choose to have the image saved to the main memory or the SD card.

PRSPlus has a lot of useful settings with more being added.

Features implemented at the moment (all features are configurable via "PRS+ Settings" menu):

* Browse Folders for books (sort by author, title, filename, author swapping surname/name)
* Menu Captions (aka Unified headers, always small, always big, sony default)
* Page Index (page index style "1 of 100", "1/100", "1/100 (0%)" etc)
* Clock (when to show, 24/12 hour modes, can be toggled on/off via hotkey configurable in Key Bindings)
* Screenshot (allows to make screenshots)
* Key Bindings

<snip>

Games

* Sudoku
* Five Balls
* Mahjong

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by pepak

Personally, my biggest problem with EPUB isn't its speed, or its justification (both of which annoy me) but its stability - 505's version of ADE is just too unstable to use, I get reboots a number of times per book compared to a reboot every ten or twenty books I get with LRF. And that's even after I learned to avoid constructs which crash ADE every single time (just try to use "*" selector in CSS to see what I mean...).

My experience was the other way around. I had LRF books reboot my reader frequently, since going exclusively to epub restarts of the reader have very rare.

Prior to switching to epub to get left justification with lrf files I had to hack the reader. Personally it should be a setting that you can turn on and off. When your eyes are older and you enjoy a larger font having full justification just gets weird with large spaces disrupting the flow. If anyone is reading this allow justification to be user controlled.

Thanks for the epub font hack, works like a charm.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by astra

So far, the edges are ragged. We have no idea if it ever change.

I had to hack the reader previously just to enjoy having lrf files with left justification.

Originally Posted by astra

All of this means that unless you have time and wish and knowledge to tweak every single book you read, by changing fonts, digging into HTML codding for CSS etc., epub is no rival to LRF.

Converting a file to the size font I prefer takes 3 clicks in Calibre. Selct the book, click convert then click ok.

Originally Posted by astra

When a new hardback edition is delivered to me by Amazon, I don't spend another 1-2-3 hours on editing it. I have already spent a certain amount of time of my life to earn money to purchase the book. Why should I spend the same time of my life to earn the money to purchase ebook and then to spend even more on editing it if I can relax and enjoy reading or watching TV or doing zillion of other things? While editing one book might sound like not too much of time investment, if you count all time you spent in the last 3 years the number is going to be quite intimidating.

You are correct here, the ebook stores should allow us to enter the margins and font size at purchase then I wouldn't have to convert the font size after purchase. I was poking around the Barnes and Noble site and they allow you to do just that. Unfortunately their epub isn't the correct flavor for my Sony... yet.

I do miss adding in the header to my lrf books with title and author. It was a nice touch that could be done on the fly as while changing font size.

[daffy4u]

I used Sigil for the first time last night. I inherited an LRF copy of World War Z on the 505 I purchased. This happened to be the last pbook I purchased before I bought my Kindle and I just could not bring myself to read it in paper.

I use Calibre to convert it to both mobi and ePub. I put the ePub version on the 5050 and noticed that all the text was centered... on all versions. I tried to fix it with a CSS but I don't know enough about what I'm doing and it didn't work. I was getting very frustrated.

Then I remembered Sigil. I haven't been following it's progress but I did remember it was designed to fix and create ePub ebooks.

I downloaded and installed it and opened the book in it. I searched and found the "center" html tag and changed it to "left". That fixed it!. I did have to go back through and find the city titles which are like chapter or section headings and re-centered them and gave them an H3 tag. It was a little slow going but much faster than anything else I was trying.

Since there is so much html code in ePub books, should I be able to open an ePub book in Dreamweaver? I tried changing the extension to .html but that didn't work.

[JSWolf]

An ePub is a ZIP file. rename it to .zip and pull out the CSS and the HTML/XML and then you can edit what you need to edit. Most of the time it's just the CSS that needs editing.

Oh and for converting from LRF, use the --remove-paragraph-spacing option.

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

An ePub is a ZIP file. rename it to .zip and pull out the CSS and the HTML/XML and then you can edit what you need to edit. Most of the time it's just the CSS that needs editing.

Great I'll give that a try. Thanks!

Oh and for converting from LRF, use the --remove-paragraph-spacing option.

I think I have that as a default setting on everything but I'll double check.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

(...)

I loved the flexibility of being able to read it with the fontin font. One thing I noticed was that occasionally I would still have slow page turns. For maybe 10 pages in a row several times through out the book, I would see "formatting" during a page turn. I could see the new page under the "formatting" symbol but it still made the page turn 2 seconds or so long (about as slow as the embedded font LRF version of the book). The book was in the main memory. I removed the SD card with other books (only 2 books in the main memory) but I would still get the "formatting" symbol. I'm not sure what to do about this.

usually, that is a sign of a badly-made epub, bad (not clean) xhtml code. if i'm feeling courageous i sometimes will open it in sigil and strip out all the extraneous junk (it's a bit horrifying all the crap that can end up in there).

Originally Posted by daffy4u

I finally figured out how make the font substitution work with PRSPlus so that I don't have to go through Calibre to embed the font.

Per the PRSPlus site.

(path to custom css is: internal memory /database/system/PRSPlus/epub/style.css)

I already had my fontin css file saved as a txt file. I just renamed a copy as "style.css" and droped it in the PRSPlus/epub/ folder. I already had a fonts folder per Zelada's instructions. I then downloaded a book from Feedbooks and moved it directly onto the 505 without every opening Calibre. It worked!

Now does anyone know how I would add the border parameter to my css file?

@font-face {
  font-family: "Fontin";
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
  src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Fontin-Regular.ttf);
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Fontin";
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: normal;
  src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Fontin-Bold.ttf);
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Fontin";
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: italic;
  src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Fontin-Italic.ttf);
}

@font-face {
  font-family: "Fontin Sans";
  font-weight: bold;
  font-style: italic;
  src: url(res:///Data/fonts/Fontin_Sans_BI.otf);
}

body {
  font-family: "Fontin", serif;
}

nice !!! i haven't checked lately, did anybody confirm if this hack will work with a 600 and / or 700 ?

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Since there is so much html code in ePub books, should I be able to open an ePub book in Dreamweaver? I tried changing the extension to .html but that didn't work.

as jon said, you can extract the context files from the epub and use dreamweaver (or, in fact, any text or code editor, including something as basic as notepad). one warning : i used dreamweaver before sigil appeared on the scene, and when it's working on long-ish text flows it can be maddeningly S..L..O..W. unless you need auto-completing code-hints or similar i recommend you do most of your code editing in sigil, if you can. it's much faster.

[JSWolf]

I've been using Notepad++ to do my editing and then using a combo of Firefox and ADE to check my edits. I do pretty good that way.

[JSWolf]

So now that you have had a go with ePub, what do you think of the 505 overall?

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So now that you have had a go with ePub, what do you think of the 505 overall?

I do like the 505 very much. I like it much more with the tweaks from PRSPlus. I've never been against the 505, I've just had a preference for the Kindle which I still do but I have decided to keep the 505 as my ePub reader (at least until I decide on a larger screen reader). There are certainly features of the 505 that I wish the Kindle had and vice versa.

These are my impressions based on un-hacked features of K2 and 505 (of course things that are important to me, may mean less than nothing to someone else):

• Font Face: better on 505 because there are more to choose from and easier to make the switch (via Calibre)
• Font Sizes: better on K2, there aren't enough "between" sizes on the 505 and they vary from book to book unless I build in a base font with Calibre or a CSS
• Margins: better on K2, I prefer more white space around the text
• Justified vs. non-justified: originally I didn't have a preference but the more I play with the 505, the more I like left justified text
• Bookmarking: better on 505, there's a dedicated button and it's fast
• Page Turn buttons: better on K2, little tiny side button on 505 side in wrong order (for me) and are too small, big round button on bottom right does not turn pages in books (it should), big round button on the left is awkward for me
• Pages vs Locations & Percentages: better on K2, wish I could have both but honestly when I see page x of y, I mentally calculate the % or fraction of the book I've read. In a pbook I would do the same thing visually. I really like K2s chapter dots a lot.
• Organization: better on the 505, collections rocks!
• Search: better on K2, not available on the 505 so the K2 wins but search is not necessary to find books on the 505 because of the collections feature but finding things within books is not possible. I lost my place while fiddling around a few times and I had to go page by page to get back to where I wanted to be and it was frustrating.
• Navigation: better on K2, I just feel I can get to what I want faster on my K2 than on the 505, maybe because I'm more comfortable to K2

I have used PRSPlus to bring in as many "like" features of K2 to the 505 and it has made the reading experience much better.

Now as far as ePub itself, I'm going with it because the industry seems to want it to be the standard. With all the tools like Calibre and those for removing DRM available, it really doesn't matter what format you start with because you can convert it for your needs (if you have a little bit of tech savvy). I will continue to purchase my ebooks from Amazon (and maybe Fictionwise depending on how that experiment goes) and convert them for use with any non-Amazon readers I own. I probably won't be buying ePub or Adobe ADE specific titles but I will download all the freebies.

[kennyc]

Hey Ducky! Thanks for that. I'm definitely in the left justified camp myself so good to hear that. I do think the navigation using the 5-way control on the kindle is much better than the Sony control. I like the look/contrast of the display on the 505 just a bit better than my K2.

Enjoy!

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

• Margins: better on K2, I prefer more white space around the text
  (...)
• Search: better on K2, not available on the 505 so the K2 wins but search is not necessary to find books on the 505 because of the collections feature but finding things within books is not possible. I lost my place while fiddling around a few times and I had to go page by page to get back to where I wanted to be and it was frustrating.

thanks for the update daffy ! it's been interesting following your experiences. just a note (to improve your reading pleasure ) i am also a fan of decent-sized margins (they make reading more pleasant and actually easier) : you can set whatever margin-size you like in epub books simply by adding that to the css. i usually define the margin on the body tag (this defines margins for the entire document unless they are over-ridden on a specific element). the css can look like this :

body {
margin : 5% 15px 5% 10%;}

you can use percentage (of the display area) or pixels to define your measurements for example but do NOT use ems to define your margins or they will increase when you enlarge the font size. i gave a margin for each of the 4 sides of the screen, the order is Top Right Bottom Left which you can remember with the mnemonic TRouBLe. i usually define about 15px right margin ; this leaves enough room to avoid the side page numbers interfering with the text, and since the text is left-aligned it will usually leave a bit of extra space there anyway so that is enough for me. for my personal taste i tend to like somewhat more space on the left side, maybe around 20px.

you can also define only one margin by specifying "margin-top" or "margin-left" or whatever. if you want to set the same margin on all four sides you can just put in one number :

body {margin : 10%;}

if you want to set the top and bottom the same and the left and right the same, you can put only two numbers in, top+bottom left+right so :

body {
margin : 10px 15px;}

that gives 10px for top and bottom, 15px for the sides.


as for search : you should get a sony 600. epub, search, handwritten notes, dictionary... and a touchscreen for turning pages.


edit : in fact, since if i remember correctly you are using your own custom user css, you could add your margin code to that and it would be automatically applied to all your books.

[daffy4u]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

edit : in fact, since if i remember correctly you are using your own custom user css, you could add your margin code to that and it would be automatically applied to all your books.

Thanks Mz. Zee! I have actually played with the margins in Calibre but I couldn't get it right in the CSS. I will add your tweak to my CSS.

I'm actually trying to learn more about CSS with a tutorial I found here. I would also like to learn some Python.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by daffy4u

Thanks Mz. Zee! I have actually played with the margins in Calibre but I couldn't get it right in the CSS. I will add your tweak to my CSS.

I'm actually trying to learn more about CSS with a tutorial I found here. I would also like to learn some Python.

glad to help ! i've heard good things about the css tutos on that site, it should be really useful. just shout out around here if you get stuck on anything. i'm impressed you're tackling python as well ; i've not yet mustered myself for that.

[JSWolf]

To specify margins, one way to do it is by using @page in the CSS as the first line like the following code. that way, you don't have to go digging into the CSS to find all the places that specify the margins.

@page { margin-bottom: 1em;margin-left: 1em;margin-right: 1em;margin-top: 1em;}