Next HW refresh fo full-sized Edge?

I think it has to do with the OCR used by the person who originally scanned the work

I agree. In these days of 'make it convenient' software, most people use auto settings for almost everything. So, it begins with poor image scans that make it more difficult for the OCR procedure, and then moves on to automated OCRs. I won't get into all the details on this, but mostly, they are just not that good and very few are capable of handling more than one language in one document. I've even tried ReadIris Pro (supposed to be able to combine two languages) and has a training feature. I was trying to ocr an old book that had a fair amount of classical greek. I ended up abandoning it after two days of persistence. It kept confusing some of the greek letters for some english ones resulting in numerous crashes and work lost. I may look into again in the future but just don't have the time right now.

I normally don't have to deal with any OCR documents, I'm sure that would be a pain if most of my documents were old books that were scanned in. I think 98% of all of the material that I have to read are written post 1990, so virtually all of them are available in some soft format or another, most often in PDF or some Office format, occasionally epub.

With regard to Greek, most of the greek symbols that I read are pretty well supported in PDF creation software like Acrobat or Latex compilers. Actually, I used to study Attic and Koine Greek over several years, and I'm sure that a lot of those texts are only available in OCR from googlebooks. But I think I can obtain most of the well known text these days in html from somewhere, and view it in a browser, so it's not such a big deal. And I think the mathematical greek symbols use a different set of encoding than that of Homer through Byzantine Greek texts, if I remember correctly. I don't know anything about modern Greek though, don't know if they still use the same accents and diacritics. Anyways, I think support of fonts should get better over time on any platform, as more localization options for an OS become available over time. I'm also hoping to be able to read some German texts out of the box, fingers crossed.

Aidren,

What I have done that worked well for Greek is to scan it into my computer, which saves it as an image, I believe, and then open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro and run "recognize text with OCR". I believe this creates an OCR mask, but it doesn't have to actually convert anything to text, so there's no muddled characters, at least not so far for me. I've only tested it. I haven't actually used it extensively yet.

Hardball,

German is also important for me as well. let me know if you have any problems. I kind of assumed you wouldn't since there aren't many special characters.

Originally Posted by Chubulor

I've had the same experience with Google Books. I downloaded Florian Cajori's "History of Mathematics" as a PDF a few months ago for free, and to my dismay every single mathematical symbol and every equation or inequality had been rendered into garbage characters. So if I was interested in Johann Bernoulli's childhood pet, I had no trouble finding that information, but the description of his mathematical work was illegible. I think it has to do with the OCR used by the person who originally scanned the work...Google doesn't scan most of those books themselves, so it's possible that some of them are scanned in a way that preserves non-Roman symbols.

It's a shame Google Books didn't take more care in converting books. but Barnes and Noble did the same thing and tried to sell it. At least they gave me a refund for the book i bought. Amazon, unfortunately, seems to have gotten this right. I just wish they'd be less proprietary.

Another question if I may:

If at the beginning, the library is set to be on the internal storage; and then at some point later, we add an SD card to the device; is transferring the entire library already on the internal storage to the SD card pretty easy process, or would it all have to be done manually?

THanks

It's a very easy process

Originally Posted by borisb

It's a very easy process

Thanks, boris; you are a man with all the answers.

Actually, Yesterday, I took the plunge and bought a full sized edge from the IT store. I concluded that, given the limbo state of the Adam, it would be very hard to find another e-reader with similar capabilities in the near future, so eDGe is really the only logical choice for that.

So far, everything has been working great, and the e-reader features are unparalleled compared to any other reader.

I do have a major problem, the music player doesn't seem to work at all, I mean it mostly doesn't recognize the mp3 files that are loaded into the library, and refuses to play in the few instances when it does; here are the details:

• The music are in mp3, DRM free (I believe), and has worked on any other computer system/ device that I have used.
• The music files are added to the library, onto the internal storage of the eDGe; the system is at its latest update (version 1.6.4119.4)
• It has always been able to play the files individually from the Audio library, once it's been imported onto the device internal storage.
• The music player application that comes with the device most of the time does not see any mp3 files in the library.
• The times that it was able to see are when I deleted the mp3 files, and then reloaded them onto the eDGe, before reboot it; after a reboot, the player is blind to the files in the library again.
• When the player did see the files in the library, trying to play it would throw "sorry, the player does not support this type of audio file" message.

Has anyone experienced this before?

Is there any solution to this problem?

Congrats on getting an eDGe. It'll grow on you

I don't recommend adding music files to the Library, mainly because it eats up precious space from the 3 GB space available internally and there's no benefit (other than being able to link a music file to an ebook).

Delete the music files from the Library and just have them on your SD card (best), or your Internal Storage (second best). The built-in music player should automatically catalog them in either of those two locations, although this can take a few minutes or longer, depending on the number of files. It may have problems with special characters in the names, but as far as I know it can handle MP3's with any compression option.

Alternatively, you can try an alternate music player as listed in the "APKs" sticky thread under "Android Apps". I particularly recommend museek as it finds and applies album art to songs.

Originally Posted by borisb

Congrats on getting an eDGe. It'll grow on you

I don't recommend adding music files to the Library, mainly because it eats up precious space from the 3 GB space available internally and there's no benefit (other than being able to link a music file to an ebook).

Delete the music files from the Library and just have them on your SD card (best), or your Internal Storage (second best). The built-in music player should automatically catalog them in either of those two locations, although this can take a few minutes or longer, depending on the number of files. It may have problems with special characters in the names, but as far as I know it can handle MP3's with any compression option.

Alternatively, you can try an alternate music player as listed in the "APKs" sticky thread under "Android Apps". I particularly recommend museek as it finds and applies album art to songs.

It took you six whole minutes to write the reply and post it, Boris?!

Impressive!

Thanks for the great info (as always)!

I take the occasional nap

Originally Posted by borisb

I take the occasional nap

Thanks again; Your suggestion was right;

Leaving the files in the library actually blocked access of certain applications' database functions on the files. So leaving it out of the library did the trick.

You come through every time, cheers.

-HB

Glad to hear it solved your problem

Originally Posted by jsfiller

Aidren,

What I have done that worked well for Greek is to scan it into my computer, which saves it as an image, I believe, and then open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro and run "recognize text with OCR". I believe this creates an OCR mask, but it doesn't have to actually convert anything to text, so there's no muddled characters, at least not so far for me. I've only tested it. I haven't actually used it extensively yet.

Thanks for responding. I have used Acrobat Pro. It actually does do a text conversion, it is just that it is on a hidden layer. You can check that layer through 'examine document' from the menu. One way to check to see how well it is done is to select the greek words and paste them somewhere else. That gives you a fairly good idea of how good a job was done by the ocr. In my case, it was pretty bad, that's why I started trying other ocr software.

Originally Posted by aidren

Thanks for responding. I have used Acrobat Pro. It actually does do a text conversion, it is just that it is on a hidden layer. You can check that layer through 'examine document' from the menu. One way to check to see how well it is done is to select the greek words and paste them somewhere else. That gives you a fairly good idea of how good a job was done by the ocr. In my case, it was pretty bad, that's why I started trying other ocr software.

Yeah, I noticed when I copied the Greek text it was really screwed up. But one thing I discovered was that if I needed to search for a Greek word, I could copy it and paste the garbled mess into the "find" window, and it would actually find the word. So the "mess" isn't simply a mess. It does maintain the Greek in there somewhere. Now that doesn't help if I need to copy and paste into a document, but I have other ways to do that, so that's not a problem for me.