Marvin 3.0

[petzi]

Thanks for clarifying the difference between Marvin 3 and Marvin SxS in your blog post at Appstafarian. To add another possible use case: To look up footnotes and references in non-fiction literature side by side with the text. For me the hassle with foot- and endnotes is one of the reason why I am shy to use eBooks for scientific literature.

The possibility for tagging notes for further processing is another feature I would need. I've seen that the tagging possibility is already included in Marvin 3! But it didn't work for me. I couldn't add new tags. Marvin didn't save and process my new tags. I've got some other tags generated automatically. Did I miss something or is this feature not yet implemented?

For reading non-fiction I would also need very urgently the synchronization of journal notes over all devices. Have you plans to look into this feature in the near future?


Peter

[democrite]

A small feature request. Perhaps Kris, you could someday experiment with font ligatures?

http://www.elliotjaystocks.com/blog/...-the-ligature/

An option for the different ligatures would be a nice touch. Digital typography still has some work to go, so for the moment I have hyphenation off, but perhaps future features, like Adobe's proposal to have a balanced justification for the web, like in InDesign, is worth keeping track of, though if it someday gets added, we'll hear about it. They have a jQuery plugin which could be worth looking into someday.

edit: found some css for number styles. Works ok in Chrome so I'd assume it'd be ok in Marvin.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...ariant-numeric

[kguil]

@petzi Yes. That's a brilliant use case. I'll add it to the list.

@democrite Depending on the font, Marvin does basic ligatures. However, I use a base component from Apple to build Marvin on and they decided to disable some of the more complex ligatures for performance reasons. AFAIK there's nothing I can do about it.

[democrite]

No prob. That's unfortunate. I'm not sure if you're using the newer iOS 8 or was it 9 WebView, if that helps or perhaps has other limits. I did try adding the CSS to a few ePubs and discretionary ligatures and number styles show up and look wonderful. I think it is possible to inject CSS though you may already be doing that.

[kguil]

@demo You managed to get discretionary ligatures working in M3 using CSS?

[democrite]

Yes, and I love it. The CSS I added:

body {
font-variant-numeric: oldstyle-nums; 
-moz-font-feature-settings:"liga=1, dlig=1"; 
-moz-font-feature-settings:"liga", "dlig"; /* EDIT: new syntax for FF 15+ */ 
-ms-font-feature-settings:"liga", "dlig"; 
-o-font-feature-settings:"liga", "dlig"; 
-webkit-font-feature-settings:"liga", "dlig"; 
font-feature-settings:"liga", "dlig";
}

I didn't yet remove the unneeded lines like for moz or see what was the minimum required. I'm not much of a programmer but had tried to make a basic ePub reader for OS X without getting very far. There's a Swift FolioReaderKit iOS reader on Github from which I did a similar CSS injection so seems possible, though for other style changes, you're probably already doing that.

[kguil]

@democrite Would you mind sharing (by email) a sample EPUB with discretionary ligatures that work in M3 when you have it? I'll certainly add it in an update.

[democrite]

Will do. Thanks Kris! I never made the complete switch from iBooks to M2 but with M3, all the nice features like sideloading fonts, it's just splendid.

[ginfonic]

Hi Kris,
Thanks for a new version. I was on Marvel 2 then turned to iBooks when it started to sync user books. And now I'm thinking to turn to Marvel 3 because of iBooks sync bugs.

What I can't live without: 1) automatically syncing books between devices; 2) automatically syncing a reading position to the farthest one between devices.

For example:
1) I add a new ePub to a Marvel folder on iCloud on a Mac (maybe hidden as iBook's).
2) When I start Marvel on a mobile device it scans this folder and if it finds a new book it adds it. The same on the other devices.
3) When I open a book it automatically goes to a farthest reading position among all my devices. I see I already can do it manually with a red button and device choosing, but it's really annoying to do it every time I open a book. We invented computers to do it for us, didn't we?
4) When I delete a book on one device it automatically deletes it from every my device (physically removing the ePub file from the iCloud folder).

Now I have to do it with iBooks adding ePub on my iPad or iPhone (because if I add it on my Mac it never appears on my other devices for some strange Apple reason).
It would be great to turn to your app again (I like it much more) but only with these syncing features I need.

Is it possible?

[kguil]

@ginfonic Thanks a lot for your feedback.

[Wyndham]

As a longtime Marvin user I was thrilled to discover M3.

It is entirely my fault for not checking this forum earlier as I had not realised M3 was on its way. Consequently I started using another app and, believing that Marvin was 'dead', removed the app from both my devices.

Copying the books from Calibre is proving tedious as I can't find a way to 'select all' - I
have separate calibre libraries to correspond with my main Marvin collections.

Thank you for developing M3.

[ginfonic]

Originally Posted by kguil

@ginfonic Thanks a lot for your feedback.

You welcome! Thank you.
And what should I do? To looking forward to a soon update with the features I need or to forget and suffer with iBooks? Only you know your plans.

[kguil]

@ginfonic You're requests (especially the first) are very complex so I can't promise you a timeframe at this point. Sorry about that.

@Wyndham Just as in M2, the most efficient way to copy books in bulk is using iTunes file transfer. I'm investigating the possibility of having an OPDS 'download all' feature and rebooting the 'calibre connector'.

[cedhax]

Originally Posted by kguil

@Wyndham Just as in M2, the most efficient way to copy books in bulk is using iTunes file transfer. I'm investigating the possibility of having an OPDS 'download all' feature and rebooting the 'calibre connector'.

There are already a number of reader apps that support background "download all" from calibre or any OPDS catalog starting a few years ago, so that you can still read a book using the same app while waiting for the download to finish. I think this is very very nice. Will M3 ever do that? If yes, any time frame?

As we all know, tethered file transfer using iTunes is not convenient.

The calibre connector approach has broken before, so I'm not too confident about it. Moreover, it won't work for other generic OPDS server, where we don't have the freedom to add a plug-in.

[democrite]

Agree background downloading would be cool, with some clickable spinning circle in the toolbar when it's running. Maybe Kris was busy enough with 3.0 and hasn't been able to get to it. 3.1, 3.2, etc. hopefully are the chances for such things.

One thing I forgot about downloading, or opening from another app, M3 maybe doesn't need the confirmation to add. If it's supported, open or add, if not, display some error. That seems simplest?