Kindle Scribe Update 5.16.2

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by tomsem

It's working okay for me.

You are saying a freshly uploaded PDF (since you updated your Scribe to 5.16.2) downloads to the Scribe with the ability to write on it? I will try another I create myself instead of a PDF downloaded from the web.

ETA: yep, I printed this page to PDF, send to kindle web, and it shows up as PR with PDF logo. Not sure why some freshly uploaded (today) PDF show up as PDF without conversion.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

You are saying a freshly uploaded PDF (since you updated your Scribe to 5.16.2) downloads to the Scribe with the ability to write on it? I will try another I create myself instead of a PDF downloaded from the web.

ETA: yep, I printed this page to PDF, send to kindle web, and it shows up as PR with PDF logo. Not sure why some freshly uploaded (today) PDF show up as PDF without conversion.

Fixed. Apparently Amazon honors stupid PDF restrictions even on PDFs that have no password. Installed QPDF to circumvent that (qpdf --decrypt restricted.pdf unrestricted.pdf). Now it works just fine.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Fixed. Apparently Amazon honors stupid PDF restrictions even on PDFs that have no password. Installed QPDF to circumvent that (qpdf --decrypt restricted.pdf unrestricted.pdf). Now it works just fine.

Interesting, good to know.

[DuckieTigger]

Something else I noticed in the online PR converter and the PR viewer on the Scribe:

• there is no apparent limit of how many TOC entries a PDF file has that gets send to kindle (the one I tried had over 400 entries in the TOC) - Kindle Create for homemade PR still cannot have more than 100
• the hierarchy of the TOC is completely preserved, but not displayed completely smart - as in you don't see how deep you are in, just that you are in - sometimes it helps to collapse and then expand an TOC item to see if the next (expandable) item is inside that one or on the same or higher level (if it doesn't disappear when collapsing, it is not a sub or subsub part of it)
• links work - both inside and external to webpages (kind of obvious, but better than before)
• crop margins gets rid of margins - no menu item, but if selecting the smallest margins that is what it is. very annoying it sometimes forgets to crop the margins after another book type was opened and you have to enable it again with turning the margins to a different setting and back to the smallest
• there is no more percentage display at the bottom (same as PDF and comic)

In short, I love the new PR on the Scribe. It finally has the benefits of the PDF viewer (search, lookup, highlighting), PR viewer (write on book), comic viewer (crop margins, show full screen including no more wasted space of percent, page, location). It does the TOC a little better than the PDF viewer - the TOC of PDF is completely flat with nothing to indicate the hierarchy.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

Something else I noticed in the online PR converter and the PR viewer on the Scribe:

• there is no apparent limit of how many TOC entries a PDF file has that gets send to kindle (the one I tried had over 400 entries in the TOC) - Kindle Create for homemade PR still cannot have more than 100
• the hierarchy of the TOC is completely preserved, but not displayed completely smart - as in you don't see how deep you are in, just that you are in - sometimes it helps to collapse and then expand an TOC item to see if the next (expandable) item is inside that one or on the same or higher level (if it doesn't disappear when collapsing, it is not a sub or subsub part of it)
• links work - both inside and external to webpages (kind of obvious, but better than before)
• crop margins gets rid of margins - no menu item, but if selecting the smallest margins that is what it is. very annoying it sometimes forgets to crop the margins after another book type was opened and you have to enable it again with turning the margins to a different setting and back to the smallest
• there is no more percentage display at the bottom (same as PDF and comic)

In short, I love the new PR on the Scribe. It finally has the benefits of the PDF viewer (search, lookup, highlighting), PR viewer (write on book), comic viewer (crop margins, show full screen including no more wasted space of percent, page, location). It does the TOC a little better than the PDF viewer - the TOC of PDF is completely flat with nothing to indicate the hierarchy.

They must have fixed something in Send To Kindle, as I was getting PDFs rejected for having too many PDF bookmarks. If only they'd fix Kindle Create too (doesn't allow multilevel either) -- but I mostly only use that for experimentation.

I will try my multi-level ~150 bookmark PDF again to see if it works now.

And yes, there was report on Reddit that the personal organizer PDF they were using has all of the links preserved.

The one thing that is worse is that page turns seem slower than PDF. But I need to check this again. And it's still early days; it looks like there's going to be page animation at some point so they can probably improve performance.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by tomsem

They must have fixed something in Send To Kindle, as I was getting PDFs rejected for having too many PDF bookmarks. If only they'd fix Kindle Create too (doesn't allow multilevel either) -- but I mostly only use that for experimentation.

I will try my multi-level ~150 bookmark PDF again to see if it works now.

And yes, there was report on Reddit that the personal organizer PDF they were using has all of the links preserved.

The one thing that is worse is that page turns seem slower than PDF. But I need to check this again. And it's still early days; it looks like there's going to be page animation at some point so they can probably improve performance.

I am not sure they fixed something. The PDF in question got sent on February 18th. I don't remember if the TOC worked before the last update or not.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by DuckieTigger

I am not sure they fixed something. The PDF in question got sent on February 18th. I don't remember if the TOC worked before the last update or not.

I never had issue with ToC navigation on Scribe, just getting the thing accepted by Send to Kindle service. And this would have been maybe 7 or 8 weeks ago.

Update: yep, Send to Kindle is converting the multilevel ToC that didn't convert before (it doesn't really tell you why in most cases).

[jhowell]

I forgot to mention one new new feature that I saw in this firmware release. It is a Weblab, which means a feature that can be remotely controlled by Amazon, called LOCKSCREEN_BOOK_COVERS_PDOC_REMOVAL.

It is hard to know for certain what this means but it appears that there is a possibility that Amazon is going to remove the ability to show the covers of personal documents (Send to Kindle) on the lock screen.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I forgot to mention one new new feature that I saw in this firmware release. It is a Weblab, which means a feature that can be remotely controlled by Amazon, called LOCKSCREEN_BOOK_COVERS_PDOC_REMOVAL.

It is hard to know for certain what this means but it appears that there is a possibility that Amazon is going to remove the ability to show the covers of personal documents (Send to Kindle) on the lock screen.

That is already the case, unless coincidence. All of my sideloaded PDFs show no cover, not even generic and all PDF converted through send to kindle to PR show generic cover. I distinctly remember seeing the real cover of a sideloaded PDF prior to this update.

Further testing also didn't show a cover for a sideloaded KFX comic, but after disabling and enabling cover view in settings, at least that is working again. Unfortunately even after disabling/enabling covers, sideloaded PDF still show no cover at all (just built in screensaver pictures), and only generic cover (name and author) for send to kindle PR.

FWIW, the sideloaded PDF and send to kindle PR all show "document" as type, and the sideloaded KFX comic does not show "document."

[tomsem]

I prefer to see the regular screensavers, so whatever.

I do hope they will begin generate thumbnails for all personal documents that have been downloaded, however - pretty ugly without one. If you side load the Print Replica document to iPad, it does show thumbnail there.

Had my first glitch with Print Replica (this was with the Sudoku book I bought): one of the pages wouldn't draw, and even some of the previous pages were blank, save for the numbers I'd filled in for the puzzle, those eventually displayed but the one page still wouldn't.

I've seen this before with the other fixed-layout formats but usually flipping the page back and forward fixed it, not here. Displayed in fine in page flip preview. I tried turning on Refresh every page, no change; loading a different book but when returning to the page, it was still blank. Finally resorted to Restart, and it's been fine since that.

I hope they can improve performance a bit.