Firmware updates, dictionaries, fonts and third-party software for M92

[Randy11]

Thank you Booxter !

Good idea to keep the link on the previous firmware

Originally Posted by Booxtor

Hi guys!

New update for M92 is available.
Pls check the first post.
Now you can try out the new PDFReader (beta).

[picco]

Originally Posted by kodomo

After going through quite a number of pdf tools/viewers/editors, I finally found one (on Linux) that is able to print the annotations : xournal .

Cool to know! Does anybody know if it would read notes of a smaller Onyx as well?

[janek]

Originally Posted by Booxtor

Hi guys!

New update for M92 is available.
Pls check the first post.
Now you can try out the new PDFReader (beta).

The comic mode of the new reader is nice. But it would be too perfect if it just worked - in that reader the option to export notes is not available...

To be frank, whats the point of publishing clearly unfinished beta software when at the same time it is announced that beta releases of firmware are now abolished...

[aghribi]

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right thread to suggest new features so point me to the right place if I am wrong.

I wanted to know if an inverted color option (white on black instead of black on white) could be considered for the pdf reader. This option helps to read in low or poor lighting conditions.

Thanks

[PF4Mobile]

Could anybody say what is new in the PDF reader?
Does it have a better workflow now?
Have they added more annotation tools (like line, rectangle etc etc)

thanks
PF

[Booxtor]

Originally Posted by PF4Mobile

Could anybody say what is new in the PDF reader?
Does it have a better workflow now?
Have they added more annotation tools (like line, rectangle etc etc)

thanks
PF

The old PDFReader isn't replaced by the new PDFReader. You have just the option to select in the preferred application if you would like to test the beta version of the new PDF Reader. The new noticeable features are reading modes like Papers mode (two column), Comics mode and auto crop. They are not 100% finished yet (it is beta), but already quite stable and usable.

The reason I published this Update is mainly the toggle for metadata prefetching feature. Some user are working with huge amounts of documents and that feature slowed down the navigation in file manager dramaticaly.

[mundey]

Thanks to booxter and boox development for providing the firmware updates. I'll mention here positives(+) and negatives(-) with the new firmware and some bugs . Good job in providing faster updates .

+ View Title setting. It's quite convenient. The setting should work even in recent reading list too but not working.

- Every update flushes user preferences and customization. Needs a more mature approach for update. It's pain doing everything again.
a. Flushed Webpage bookmarks (stored by user) and default bookmarks ( changed google.com to google.de, similar to wiki link)
b. User installed fonts are removed. i guess user installed screen-savers will be removed too.
c. TimeZone reset to HK.
d. Custom apps need to install again (FM, i guess custom dictionaries too).

- The dictionary look up while reading is not correctly reading words.
a. Word selection is cumbersome and sometimes user selects a word while the look up shows a different word. Problem is the look up is not even close to the searched word (select septon, it shows epyllion). So needs improvement here. I haven't used star-dict before but color dict is pretty accurate.
b. Usually it's one word at a time we do look up for, so while in dictionary mode maybe it will be good idea to do whole word selection upon click on word. One click selection is there but highlighting is wrong (select space and character from the left side and leave last character from the selected word).

- Beta PDF reader is missing preferred features of the existing PDF reader. So I think I'll not check further. Maybe best if we improve the existing one.

- Cannot scribble for about 1.5 cm margin from top and 1.5cm below. There is no margin settings given anywhere. Needless to mention i did pen calibration before doing this.

- The language selection from settings shows some of the list elements without any text and some with unreadable characters. If a language characters are not supported, no need to keep that in the list. Some of the language files are not fully converted yet so for them labels are still shown in English. I think this was corrected in the previous update of June 1.7. But it's appeared again.

- Picsel Document Viewer (doc, xls, ppt) needs lot of improvement. Formatting, support for the document readability.

- Upon zoom, PDF images are not displayed and tables formatting is lost. Just text is shown.

[janek]

Originally Posted by Booxtor

The old PDFReader isn't replaced by the new PDFReader. You have just the option to select in the preferred application if you would like to test the beta version of the new PDF Reader. The new noticeable features are reading modes like Papers mode (two column), Comics mode and auto crop. They are not 100% finished yet (it is beta), but already quite stable and usable.

The reason I published this Update is mainly the toggle for metadata prefetching feature. Some user are working with huge amounts of documents and that feature slowed down the navigation in file manager dramaticaly.

I think someone should advise Onyx about using feature freeze before releasing new versions of firmware: fix things first, release, and THEN add new features. The way things are now, we will never get bugfree software.

[PF4Mobile]

Originally Posted by zs1901

Hi Booxter,
I bought my M92 just a few days ago, and I have tried both your update-20120105.zip and update-20120607.zip. Here is my problem:
When plugged to PC via usb, a message box asking "do you want to connect to PC?", after answering yes, the M92 shows a picture of hooking up.

Unfortunately, nothing happens on the PC side. The PC can't detect any device. I tried this on two different PC, one with Window XP and the other one is with Window 7.

Is this the common issue with M92? My Nook Simple Touch works perfectly on both PC, so I don't think it's the PC problem. Please help...

If you have a firewall and an antivirus disable them both for a little while and see if you see the ereader as an external drive.

[Booxtor]

Originally Posted by mundey

Thanks to booxter and boox development for providing the firmware updates. I'll mention here positives(+) and negatives(-) with the new firmware and some bugs . Good job in providing faster updates .

Hi,
Please note "Booxtor" (not Booxter)

+ View Title setting. It's quite convenient. The setting should work even in recent reading list too but not working.

Actualy I don't like that feature don't use it currently. It is still not finished and devteam is worinkg around it.

- Every update flushes user preferences and customization. Needs a more mature approach for update. It's pain doing everything again.
a. Flushed Webpage bookmarks (stored by user) and default bookmarks ( changed google.com to google.de, similar to wiki link)
b. User installed fonts are removed. i guess user installed screen-savers will be removed too.
c. TimeZone reset to HK.
d. Custom apps need to install again (FM, i guess custom dictionaries too).

This claim is not completely true. If you are hacking on the update file and do your customisation by modifiying it (copying of fonts, dicts, screensavers etc. in it), please don't be surprized when that kind of customisation is gone after update with a new (not modified) file. It is actually not that much complicated to modify the update file again. Regular installed fonts and dicts are not affected during update.

- The dictionary look up while reading is not correctly reading words.
a. Word selection is cumbersome and sometimes user selects a word while the look up shows a different word. Problem is the look up is not even close to the searched word (select septon, it shows epyllion). So needs improvement here. I haven't used star-dict before but color dict is pretty accurate.
b. Usually it's one word at a time we do look up for, so while in dictionary mode maybe it will be good idea to do whole word selection upon click on word. One click selection is there but highlighting is wrong (select space and character from the left side and leave last character from the selected word).

Please don't be so generalising.
The corret way would be to say: there are some PDF Documents where:
a) ...
b) ...

This problem has been already mentioned in older posts and because of some problems with the given Adobe SDK not as easy to solve as we'd like

- Beta PDF reader is missing preferred features of the existing PDF reader. So I think I'll not check further. Maybe best if we improve the existing one.

Beta PDFreader is missing a couple of preferred features of the existing PDF reader. It is still a very beta

- Cannot scribble for about 1.5 cm margin from top and 1.5cm below. There is no margin settings given anywhere. Needless to mention i did pen calibration before doing this.

It is again about modifiying of Update File (copiying of Scribble background templates in it). I have just forgotten to do it. Yesterday I have replaced the Update with the file with correct templates.
I would also suggest you to read my first post about Scribble background templates carefully

- The language selection from settings shows some of the list elements without any text and some with unreadable characters. If a language characters are not supported, no need to keep that in the list. Some of the language files are not fully converted yet so for them labels are still shown in English. I think this was corrected in the previous update of June 1.7. But it's appeared again.

You have obviously changed the menu font. Some fonts of M92 support just latin encodings and you won't be able to see Chinese or Arabic letters.

- Picsel Document Viewer (doc, xls, ppt) needs lot of improvement. Formatting, support for the document readability.

It is actually third party software and unfortunately Onyx dev team has other priorities currently. I would not expect a lot of improvements very soon.

- Upon zoom, PDF images are not displayed and tables formatting is lost. Just text is shown.

It is just a nature of reflowed PDFs.
If you have documents with pictures and tables it is better to use standard zoom and not the reflow feature.

[Free]

Even if I use "Settings"-"view Title Setting" and set it to "display file name",but "Recent Reading" also display book title.

[janek]

Originally Posted by Booxtor

Hi,
This claim is not completely true. If you are hacking on the update file and do your customisation by modifiying it (copying of fonts, dicts, screensavers etc. in it), please don't be surprized when that kind of customisation is gone after update with a new (not modified) file. It is actually not that much complicated to modify the update file again. Regular installed fonts and dicts are not affected during update.

Well, update resets website bookmarks, web cache and history, cookies, wifi passwords, website passwords, reading history, music player settings and (probably, i dont use them) - bookmarks. All this is clearly user space and should not be touched by updates - it is really strange somebody came up with an update scheme that deletes all that on a linux machine - there's no such technical need whatsoever! (On the other hand the MAC address is changed too, which is "hardware" and should remain constant) Of course you can re-type all passwords and recreate all bookmarks by hand, but why the heck do that?

To be more positive, I have a question. I stored all the user space databases before updating (the whole /root/ directory, that is). Now please tell me what happens if i simply overwrite the new /root/ directory with the old one? Beside my own case, if simply overwriting the root directory is safe, it should be trivial to write a backup script to backup all user settings to sd card and then recreate them after update.

[Mono]

Janek,
wifi passwords, reading history and maybe even more is not affected by firmware update.

I do not know if website bookmarks, web cache and history, cookies, website passwords, music player settings and bookmarks are affected. I do not use it that much.

It is true that, also time, date, timezone, user language (I am not sure if it is preserved or not) and MAC address should be preserved.

To my opinion fonts and dictionaries do not have to be preserved as user may place them in user (non system) partition or even SD card (I think...), that is easily accessible from computer. No need to alter the firmware instalation file or to install OTFM file manager (for M92) to copy files to system partition.

It would be nice, if also sleep-mode screens could be placed in "user space", like dictionaries or fonts, so that one does not have to copy the files to system part. In my case it is 50+ files, so it takes time....

Janek, I agreee that it would be fine to have "bug free" firmware and than fine-tune it and add new features. But I can imagine that to replace old pdf reader by new one may be the best and fastest way to achieve this goal... We do not see into internal workings of the old one.

The firmware could be better and less buggy and there could be a better work flow... But for my style of using it, it does most of the things that I need. I do not have the hardware problems and I had less hangups (maybe 2-5 in 7 months of daily use) than in Windows. It is to my opinion acceptable and very near to stable. But maybe that parts of firmware I do not use are more buggy. I do not know... I use M92 mostly for reading pdf documents and scribling in it.

I must say, I expected the firmware development faster than it is in reality. Some things are fixed or improved very fast, some that seem to be also easy take long time. I do not know, if the reason is, that the programmers do not get the info or it is more difficult than I expect or it is not high priority for Onyx or ...

Anyway, I would recomed M92 to my friends even thought it is not perfect. I do not know any better solution on the market... Maybe Pocket Book...

---

I didn't have much time to test a new firmware, namely beta release of a new pdf reader.

I like 2 collumns mode. It works as expected. There is a 'problem' if the 1 and 2 collumn texts are mixed on one page. That is standard on the first page (headline and annotation) and sometimes last few pages. Also tables and graphs/pictures may be one-column while text is two-column. Hard to say, how this should be tackled. Probably to show parts that are one column as one column (and show it twice - every time the reader passes that section of left or right collumn...).

I do not know if those 'peculiar' parts can be detected. Generally everything is possible, but the question is if the pdf engine interface allows to capture this info in +- easy way, or at least the hard way. Even with scanned documents it could be handled. Just the detection, if there is the white central margin, is needed...

Sorry for long post...

[janek]

Originally Posted by Mono

Janek,
wifi passwords, reading history and maybe even more is not affected by firmware update.

I do not know if website bookmarks, web cache and history, cookies, website passwords, music player settings and bookmarks are affected. I do not use it that much.

I updated from "old" March anti-freeze firmware (0326 was that?) and all data that I listed has been removed. There's improvement though. Previous update deleted my sketches as well, this time they are preserved

My point about feature freeze pertains to the fact that Onyx is not labelling their updates "beta" anymore, yet still release unfinished products. Since I use Boox as a "production machine" I'm only willing to update if i know that next firmware is no worse than the currenty used. So if I see no "beta" in release name I expect that software has no serious regressions that may affect my workflow. If I ever get in the mood for experimenting and all that, sure, I'll install beta knowing that they may fail. If I know they are beta.

Now the new version has some problems fixed but introduces new ones in old features...

[Mono]

I do not know. I updated 5 or 6 times and never had to enter wifi password. The same with the reading history. Also my sketches have not been touched by firmware updates...

Maybe it has to do something with installing anti-freeze firmware. I did not installed it. I guess it erased most or all user data (to get rid of potentialy corrupted databases that might cause ill-behaviour of M92) that are normaly preserved in firmware update.