Firmware 2.7 is out!!!!!!!!!

[tribble]

Originally Posted by Mambo

Guys, as I understand so far Irex developers got this far with the zooming facility. They have released it for 2.7, but in the future there will be improvements, new features, fine tuning relevant to zooming and then it will be really usable.
Now they only showed us that they are able to do it, so that we can start waiting for the next version.

Hehe, patience was never one of my virtues.
But it seems, that there are many good things to come ahead.
Personally, i really like the zoom option like it is already, because i can "crop" my books on the device. And i can look at some details when reading papers.

[CommanderROR]

Now, if only they can get reflow to work...^^

but seriously...this time iRex did a good job. The new features may still be a bit immature, but it's a large sep foward anyway. If they manage to make a large step like that for 2.8 as well, then we'll probably have a pretty useable device by christmas. I just hope the next big step will be power management...but I guess we'll know soon enough...

[yokos]

Yamp! iLiad has new functions.
Wow, imho 2.7 is a great step.
I read now a large sized newspaper [German DIE ZEIT] without any cropping or splitting of pages.
zooming -> adjust to vertical height of article.
panning -> jumping between columns [panning function is very intuitive for me]

A con [already mentioned]: iLiad shows pdf's bounding box as a black bar, this is annoying for me.

[vvoi666]

haven't tried this myself -> is wpa working for wlan?
should have been in this release, right?

[tribble]

Originally Posted by vvoi666

haven't tried this myself -> is wpa working for wlan?
should have been in this release, right?

Nope! But it wasnt planned for this release either.
It has been said, that iRex is working on it, but i do not think, that this is a high priority issue there.

[vvoi666]

damn, i'm stuck with this &%$§?%$ cable then.
well, let's hope for a 2.8 implementation.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by Mambo

Guys, as I understand so far Irex developers got this far with the zooming facility. They have released it for 2.7, but in the future there will be improvements, new features, fine tuning relevant to zooming and then it will be really usable.

My point is that it will never be usable on an eInk device.

PDF is a page-layout format - not an eBook format. Zooming does not work like HTML where the text only gets larger. Zooming a PDF makes the whole page larger.

Now, if the PDF was formatted so that the actual content was in an area roughly the proportions of the iLiad screen, then zoom becomes useful: you zoom in until the text fills the screen - probably making it easy to read.

However, if the content is formatted to use the whole (larger than the iLiad screen) page, then zooming is sort of like reading a book through a microscope - you can only see part of the page and have to pan to see the rest.

(And I won't get into how using the pen reduces your battery life.)

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather read a pBook than an eBook that I have to pan around to see all the content - making zoom and pan a useless feature right now.

Now, supposedly tagged PDFs will work as they should, but I haven't gotten around to trying them out yet. But I don't have high hopes.

[arivero]

To be usable or not, it is a question of interface. It could memorize a sequence of zooms/rotations. Ej for a two column text the zoom could process to "repaginate" the book so that each page is shown in four pages. As for panning, moving, etc, you can use the keys instead of the pen.

Originally Posted by rlauzon

My point is that it will never be usable on an eInk device.

PDF is a page-layout format - not an eBook format. Zooming does not work like HTML where the text only gets larger. Zooming a PDF makes the whole page larger.

Now, if the PDF was formatted so that the actual content was in an area roughly the proportions of the iLiad screen, then zoom becomes useful: you zoom in until the text fills the screen - probably making it easy to read.

However, if the content is formatted to use the whole (larger than the iLiad screen) page, then zooming is sort of like reading a book through a microscope - you can only see part of the page and have to pan to see the rest.

(And I won't get into how using the pen reduces your battery life.)

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd rather read a pBook than an eBook that I have to pan around to see all the content - making zoom and pan a useless feature right now.

Now, supposedly tagged PDFs will work as they should, but I haven't gotten around to trying them out yet. But I don't have high hopes.

[VillageReader]

Well, as they say, never say never. The preview announcement on Adobe Reader V 8.0 seems to say that it will be easier to use for e-book formats (and presumably other docs prepared the same way). And there has also been an announcement on an 'agreement' for an open book format that is supported by iRex, Mobipocket & a large number of publishers - see the link I posted in the news section. A lot cooking - I think there will be some pleasant Christmas surprises in store.

[scotty1024]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

My point is that it will never be usable on an eInk device.

iRex could add two features that would make the iLiad much more useful for PDF reading:

1. Auto margin cropping.
2. Auto rotate and crop into two pages for letter/A4 documents.

Personally I'd see them as two options in the settings panel.

If both are selected: Auto crop margins and if still too big, rotate and crop into two pages.

Neat, simple, no messing around with the stylus, no re-flow, no tags. The point is to be able to read the document not to mess about.

[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by scotty1024

iRex could add two features that would make the iLiad much more useful for PDF reading:

1. Auto margin cropping.
2. Auto rotate and crop into two pages for letter/A4 documents.

Personally I'd see them as two options in the settings panel.

If both are selected: Auto crop margins and if still too big, rotate and crop into two pages.

Neat, simple, no messing around with the stylus, no re-flow, no tags. The point is to be able to read the document not to mess about.

But after all that, it's not PDF and it violates the idea of PDF: to display a document the same on every device.

While PDF is the best format for the iLiad right now, that doesn't make it a good format for eBooks.

Personally, I don't see any value in trying to make PDF's square peg try to fit into eBook's round hole.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by rlauzon

But after all that, it's not PDF and it violates the idea of PDF: to display a document the same on every device.

Oh, I don't know about that. He's not suggesting changing the actual document, just having an auto zoom level that zooms to the edges of the text, and rotates 90°. I can do that in Acrobat Reader 7.0, it's not even difficult.

[pdam]

... a reason for fitting that square peg in a round hole, for the likes of me, is this ... I have about 150 PDF articles outstanding that I have to read, (and about 400 filed). It is a bit of a pain having to extract the text to RTF then reprint them back to PDF in a different size, but I'm lucky enough to have Acrobat Pro, so have been able to automate this task (which makes it worth doing).

I'm not violating any laws by doing this (no DRM on my files) and for me the Iliad is great for reading these PDF's ... also with the new zoom feature, at a pinch I can read articles I haven't had time to convert ...

It's not perfect ... but it is usable and displaying PDF's is so useful because of amount of them. Of course in an ideal world everything would automatically be converted to something like oebps ... and we'd have a decent reader ... but for where we are right now this device makes existing documents more useful ...

[rlauzon]

FYI. My battery test just finished.

Full battery before I left for work. Powered on at 7am. I had to power it off to go home at 4pm. Back on at 4:30pm and I finally got a low battery warning at 6:30pm.

So that's 11 hours of on time - going in and out of eBooks and many page turns (but not 11 hours straight of page turns).

That's up from 9.5 hours in 2.6.1.

[rlauzon]

One more thing...

I just synced my books (deleting old ones and putting new ones on) from the internal memory and the transfer seemed to go significantly faster than before.

Anyone else seen this?