[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[Faterson]

Bug report / Feature request:

When highlights and notes are exported into the XHTML file, the highlights get converted to plain-text. Neither italics are preserved, nor bold, nor paragraph breaks. Could these features be preserved, please? (At least via a global Marvin setting?)

Similarly, when notes are exported to the XHTML file, all line breaks are deleted. So, if I intentionally leave a line blank in Marvin while composing a note, to organize the text in the note better, the note gets exported to the XHTML file as a single line anyway, making it (more) difficult to read. Again, could it at least be an option to preserve manual hard line-breaks when exporting notes to the XHTML file?

[kguil]

I'll look into it. Will give you an update on it tomorrow.

[Faterson]

Thank you, Kris. I should add that italic/bold/other formatting also gets removed after highlighting a passage and pressing the Copy button in Marvin and pasting into a rich-text editor. Paragraph breaks do get preserved. For copy-paste operations, however, I don't think it's as important for the formatting to be preserved as it's important in the XHTML file. Marvin users might wish to share their XHTML files with other readers, and if the highlighted passages are distorted in them, it just doesn't look good.

I have also tested this in Bluefire Reader with its export of highlights/notes via email, and it does the same thing: converts highlights to plain-text, removes manual line-breaks from notes. I hope that this is not another iOS obstacle that it will be difficult to overcome (similarly to the highlighting bugs).

Finally, I tested this in iBooks, but because it absurdly doesn't export highlights along with the attached notes, nothing can be said about the highlights there. However, if you export the notes from iBooks, the hard line-breaks in notes do get preserved, which gives me hope. (For copy-paste, formatting is removed in iBooks, too, but like I said, this is not as important as the exported highlights/notes being precise.)

[kguil]

Hi Faterson, sorry for taking long to get back. I'm struggling with one last feature before the next update. It's taking a lot of time to fine-tune (now almost all is OK).

The easy one: Losing the line breaks in exported notes is an oversight. I'll get that fixed in the next update.

The hard one: Exporting highlights and selections with formatting intact is a bit harder. I'll work on it but I might not be able to fit it into the very next update.

[Faterson]

Thank you very much, Kris. This is not an urgent issue, although it will be certainly great to see it fixed.

Originally Posted by kguil

sorry for taking long to get back.

You've got to be kidding. Mega-corporations with thousands of employees, like Apple and Amazon, seem to exult in ignoring user feedback and failing to respond to it for years, and you call the space between 1st January and 2nd January "long"? I'm astonished by the seemingly murderous rate at which you've been working on improving Marvin. You know, most people take a couple of days (or even weeks) off around the New Year holidays. I hope you can keep it up, but not at the expense of your health and (to use corporate slang) "work-life balance".

[kguil]

Cheers Faterson. Don't worry... its been a great end-of-year.

[kguil]

The last big feature for the January update is ready. 2-column reading, smoother page turn animations and substantial performance improvements (http://marvinapp.com/whatsnew.html).

A special thanks to all of you. There are around 40 new features and improvements and most of them were your ideas and requests.

ETA is about 2 weeks - 1 week for testing and another for Apple to get it through.

[orion2001]

Hi kris,

Just stumbled across Marvin in the app store after getting fed up with iBooks and I have to say that I am really impressed with what you've done so far. I'll post with more detailed feedback and some suggestions when I get home, but I did want to report a bug I am facing (which may have already been brought to your attention).

After I build a Summary and try to add it to my Library, it always gives me an "OOPS, There has been an error adding the summary to your library" error. The result being that I can never read any of the summaries that are created. Not sure if others have reported this, but it happens to me every single time. I'm on IOS 5.0.1, Jailbroken, on the iPad 2. Thanks a ton for all your efforts and I'm looking forward to the next update!

[kguil]

Hi Orion,

Would it be possible for you to send me an email at support@marvinapp.com so that I guide you through a diagnostics procedure? I need to verify that the problem is not related to the jailbreak.

[orion2001]

Originally Posted by kguil

Hi Orion,

Would it be possible for you to send me an email at support@marvinapp.com so that I guide you through a diagnostics procedure? I need to verify that the problem is not related to the jailbreak.

Hi Kris,

Absolutely! Will email you in a minute.

[JSWolf]

I'd like to add some more features to Marvin.

0. Please do not wait until version 1.2 to fix the paragraph spacing. Do so now and release a new version. As it is now, no ePub is readable using Marvin because of the paragraph spacing. That is one thing that is needed so I can start to use Marvin to actually read. I do not read with paragraph spaces as they take me out of the book every time I finish a paragraph.

1. Respect an indent of 0. Don't override that.

2. ToC (ncx) support.

3. I'd like to have the ePub's formatting used as an option. I do format my ePub the way I like it to look and if I could use that, that would be great.

4. Use more of the screen. When in full screen mode, get rid of the book's title at the top. Use that space for more text. There is room for at least one more line of text at the bottom of the screen when the progress bar is not showing. Also, the left/right margins are too large and will be even worse on an iPhone. Please go out to the edges.

5. Make all of the various options have an off switch that uses the ePub's default for each of the options. That would mean that if I prefer how the ePub is coded, I can have it like that for each of the options.

6. A true full screen mode where the text goes to all four edges of the screen.

7. Embedded fonts should be supported.

8. Show how many pages are left in the entire ePub instead of just 4 pages left in chapter.

9. The way the search works should (IMHO) be changed to search the entire ePub and not just the current chapter. Take a James Patterson book (for example), it can have over 100 chapters. The way search works, I'd have to hit the arrow to move on way too many times. Just have the search search forwards or backwards until it wither finds what's being searched for or ends up not finding it.

10. Savable options. Save the options so they can be recalled later. Be able to save multiple option sets.


All of these things would make Marvin even better. The options in bold are ones that need (IMHO) to be implemented now and not with 1.2 or later.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

@snarko - I've corrected Marvin not to arbitrarily indent any paragraphs. Paragraph indentation now follows the book's CSS rules properly.

This will make it in the "holiday" update.

It's not working. I have an eBook loaded that has text-indent's of 0 in some places and they are overridden by Marvin.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

Would adding Google Drive as a cloud service make anyone happy?

Adding SugarSync support would make me happy.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Faterson

Finally a Worthy Stanza Successor!

Not yet. But it can get there. Marvin still needs some tweaks/fixes to make it worthy.

And as for a Stanza successor, Bluefire blew it away and still does. Marvin will too when it is ready.

[kguil]

Thanks for your feedback Jon,

Some comments...

0. Please do not wait until version 1.2 to fix the paragraph spacing. Do so now and release a new version. As it is now, no ePub is readable using Marvin because of the paragraph spacing. That is one thing that is needed so I can start to use Marvin to actually read. I do not read with paragraph spaces as they take me out of the book every time I finish a paragraph.

I understand. Unfortunately, Marvin isn't currently in a state to be submitted yet (It's in the "middle" of a build). I'm expecting to submit to Apple by today week.

1. Respect an indent of 0. Don't override that.

That's fixed for 1.2.

2. I'd like to have the ePub's formatting used as an option. I do format my ePub the way I like it to look and if I could use that, that would be great.

I'll be working on that soon.

3. Use more of the screen. When in full screen mode, get rid of the book's title at the top. Use that space for more text. There is room for at least one more line of text at the bottom of the screen when the progress bar is not showing.

I'm already working on a prototype to do that.

Also, the left/right margins are too large and will be even worse on an iPhone. Please go out to the edges.

Technically, the left/right margins already go all the way down to zero. Some ePubs have CSS that overrides my minimum margin settings. Internally, I'm trying to strike a balance between respecting the original layout of the book and provide customisation. If I aggressively override what the ePub says I'll run into other formatting problems. I'll look into it more deeply.

4. Make all of the various options have an off switch that uses the ePub's default for each of the options. That would mean that if I prefer how the ePub is coded, I can have it like that for each of the options.

To be honest, I'd rather have a global "user publisher's layout" per book rather than fine-grained on/off switches. I don't want to alienate non-advanced users with too many options.

5. A true full screen mode where the text goes to all four edges of the screen.

Got it.

6. Embedded fonts should be supported.

Working on it, including user loaded TTFs and OTFs.

7. Show how many pages are left in the entire ePub instead of just 4 pages left in chapter.

As discussed earlier in this thread, there is a technical limitation to doing this properly. The book needs to be prerendered for this to happen (ideally in the background not to keep the user waiting). However, there are certain tasks that Apple are not happy about me backgrounding. I don't want to risk getting rejected from the app store. As a compromise, I added estimates of percentage in the book.

8. The way the search works should (IMHO) be changed to search the entire ePub and not just the current chapter. Take a James Patterson book (for example), it can have over 100 chapters. The way search works, I'd have to hit the arrow to move on way too many times. Just have the search search forwards or backwards until it wither finds what's being searched for or ends up not finding it.

You're right. Search needs to be improved.

9. Savable options. Save the options so they can be recalled later. Be able to save multiple option sets.

This isn't too difficult to do and a good idea. I just need to come up with a good UI to do this such that it won't be confusing to casual users.