New Firmware Upgrade coming Friday-Monday

[theducks]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I thought so too, but it I just went and looks and there is no such thing as SAVE AS on the menu.

The version I have is apparently Wordstar Professional Release 4

Maybe I just need to know the right commands to do a save as. Hell if I could just get it to plain text that would be good enough.

I opened my old WS5 "dummies" type manual.
Look at :
"Print to disk": Types are ASCII, ASCII256 (for IBMPC charset)
Those will lose Bold or Italics.

I still have copies of Wordperfect 8 Professional that will read WS files and save to other types (IIRC, RTF, Word6 DOS)
How many files are we talking about? (we can take this off line. PM me)

[Sunspark]

For those who want to stick to the 1030 instead, here is a translation of some of the options:

Textfile reading options page 1:

1- About
2- Go to page dialog ['2']
3- Recent books list [Long '6']
4- Find in Dictionary (T5) [Long '3']
5- Cite selection dialog
6- Bookmark list ['7']
7- Search dialog [ ? ]
8- Settings menu [Long Ok]

Textfile reading optons page 2:

1- Show manual
2- Show key mapping [Long '1']

Settings page 1:

1- Default font face <Calibri>
2- Default font size <32>
3- Font antialiasing <on for all fonts>
4- Interline space <100%>
5- Page orientation <0' (Portrait)>
6- Footnotes at page bottom <on>
7- Show time <Off>
8- Landscape pages <One>

Settings page 2:

1- Preformatted text <off>
2- Document embedded styles <on>
3- Inverse display <normal>
4- Status line <off>
5- Font kerning <off>
6- Hyphenation <Russian_EnUS>
7- Page margins

Hyphenation menu:

1- No hyphenation
2- Algorithmic hyphenation
6- English_GB
7- English_US

For bookmarking a long press of 1-8 to set, short press to go to.

[Sunspark]

Re: Wordstar

Once you lug your CP/M machine down the mountain through 10 feet of snow both ways, you could then fire up the boilers, print out your document using a 8 pin dot matrix (9 hadn't yet been invented), and finally run it through a modern OCR program and spellcheck the results.

Teasing aside, dude, you do know that after 30 years that the magnetic domains on the floppy disks may have weakened? If not, why not just use a null modem serial cable and just transfer the stuff to your normal computer that way?

Xmodem for the win!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Sunspark

Re: Wordstar

Once you lug your CP/M machine down the mountain through 10 feet of snow both ways, you could then fire up the boilers, print out your document using a 8 pin dot matrix (9 hadn't yet been invented), and finally run it through a modern OCR program and spellcheck the results.

Teasing aside, dude, you do know that after 30 years that the magnetic domains on the floppy disks may have weakened? If not, why not just use a null modem serial cable and just transfer the stuff to your normal computer that way?

Xmodem for the win!

Hee-Hee Xmodem hee-hee!

[ekaser]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Well, the original software that was on my PP was bad too.There were many criticisms of the way the device can completely miss button presses. I found that slow definite presses were required, as quick clicks were often missed.

I'm quite sure (from much experience with low-power devices that go into 'sleep' modes) that what's happening is that:
1) The unit is asleep (VERY minimal power).
2) You quickly press and release a button.
3) The pressed button starts to wake the unit up, but before it completes its wakeup and scans the buttons to see which one was pressed, you've already released the button, so it doesn't see any button down, and doesn't do anything, and goes back to sleep.

The only way to fix this is if the unit has HARDWARE to 'latch' which button was pressed to wake up the unit. If the unit doesn't have that 'latch' hardware, then the only hope of improvement is to add a "button scan" VERY shortly after the wakeup starts. But usually in these situations, there's a certain amount of "wakeup processing" that HAS to be done before anything else can be done. So, of course, only Jinke can say whether or not this can be improved, and they don't talk...

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by ekaser

I'm quite sure (from much experience with low-power devices that go into 'sleep' modes) that what's happening is that:
1) The unit is asleep (VERY minimal power).
2) You quickly press and release a button.
3) The pressed button starts to wake the unit up, but before it completes its wakeup and scans the buttons to see which one was pressed, you've already released the button, so it doesn't see any button down, and doesn't do anything, and goes back to sleep.

That would also explain why the older firmware was more responsive to button presses, since it never went to sleep and ran the battery down in a few days.

[mav86]

Originally Posted by polly

Why does this surprise you. I couldn't make Astak or BeBooks firmware do anything with some Calibre created FB2 files. They simply wouldn't open. I installed the LBook firmware and those books open without any problem and look really nice. Now, if the menus were just in English instead of Ukrainian...

My LIT files convert very well into ePubs, so I don't worry about trying to read them.

What program do you use to convert your LIT files into ePubs? I have LIT files that I cannot open on my Astak and I would like to read them.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by mav86

What program do you use to convert your LIT files into ePubs?

Calibre is very good at LIT to ePub conversion.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

That would also explain why the older firmware was more responsive to button presses, since it never went to sleep and ran the battery down in a few days.

Except the latest Astak/Jinke firmware is great on batteries, AND is very good on picking up button presses. They must have found, at least, a partial solution.

[mav86]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Calibre is very good at LIT to ePub conversion.

Thanks for the info!

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Except the latest Astak/Jinke firmware is great on batteries, AND is very good on picking up button presses. They must have found, at least, a partial solution.

Except there is no noticeable difference in button response between the latest AstekV5 firmware (Jinke stock) and the latest LBook V5 firmware (also Jinke based, but enhanced). I just reloaded the Astak firmware again to make a comparison, and then went back to the Lbook firmware. So if there is any difference, it must be too small to notice with my very casual test. The earlier Astak and BeBook firmware for V5 had lousy battery life, but quite good response time. I think that ekaser got it right, response time is all linked to the time required to wakeup from sleep. It is even more noticeable on the V3 that runs at half the processor clock speed of the V5.

[kennyc]

Not seeing anything new under firmware....??

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Not seeing anything new under firmware....??

Yup, the Friday-Monday time frame is well past here and well into Tuesday. Still no firmware update showing at theezreader.com. Maybe Lbook will have something better out even sooner then. If Lbook gets the CoolReader menus translated to English and can make CoolReader optional for EPUB, they just might have the best available firmware for the V5?

[omro]

Why is the LBook firmware so much more advanced?

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by omro

Why is the LBook firmware so much more advanced?

Lbook is apparently the only Jinke/Hanlin reseller that actually has software people working on the product, so they always seem to be several steps ahead in correcting bugs or adding new features. The other resellers are mainly just sales organizations that completely depend on Jinke for all their firmware except for the logo screens.