Ebook Reader Fury

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

You've said in the past that you've never used an Android reader app so I'm not sure why you're worried about it.

However, in answer to your question - they vary. The ones based on the Adobe or Webkit rendering engines are good enough for me. The ones based on the CoolReader engine not so much. The latter are the ones which seem to prioritise user CSS overrides over book's own CSS.

It's a bit like the variety in eink devices, though. It can depend on how the HTML tags controlling the embedded font have been set up. Applying the embedded font to a <span> may have a better chance of surviving than applying to a <p> or <div> if a user has also enabled a 'Customise font' option for the main body text.

I did think about getting the new FireHD10. If I was to someday get an Andorid tablet, it would be good to know what app I'd need to read ePub.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I did think about getting the new FireHD10. If I was to someday get an Andorid tablet, it would be good to know what app I'd need to read ePub.

My answer is the same as when you last asked it. PocketBook would be my first suggestion for those wanting an app which does a pretty good job with honouring book CSS. The price is right, it's full featured and free.

Bookari is also pretty good but I'm not sure whether this app has been abandoned by its creators. No updates for over 2 years.

I've no idea whether either will run on Amazon's not-really-Android tablets. I avoid such devices like the plague - 'real' Android or nothing for me.

[Mister L]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Which programs/apps are you referring to with "all of them worth mentioning"?

I've been using TTS on Windows and Android for several years. As far as I can tell none of the TTS progs/apps pay any attention to which tags are used (<h1-6>, <em>, <i> etc) in the epub HTML.

What little "context intelligence" does exist in TTS seems to me to be dependent on the Voice you use to do the speaking and I'm not aware that any of the Voices I've used changed depending on HTML tag.

If you know different, I'm all ears, because I find the lack of progress over the last decade in TTS for Joe Public's own ebooks to be depressing. Too much money to be made selling Audible subscriptions using real voice artistes.

I see no evidence that your average TTS app for ebooks doesn't do exactly that, i.e. convert to txt before speaking.

I have little to no experience with general public TTS apps and I'm thinking more about the apps specifically made for blind people who cannot use visual interfaces (for example JAWS). I'm not an expert by any means but I've been learning more about accessibility lately and from what I understand, those applications will both modify the audio presentation of the text (not necessarily with inflexion but sometimes by announcing "title" or similar before reading the text) and (possibly more importantly, for blind users) when reading html they rely on the tags for navigation. So for instance, if you have a file with several levels of headings, you can jump from heading to heading to find the section you're interested in, if the html is semantically formatted, the same way that visually you can skim a document looking for larger, bold centered text to get an overview. You can't do that if it's only p tags styled with CSS. Here is some information: https://www.boia.org/blog/how-does-j...read-web-pages

I've also encountered some youtube "news" videos (no examples come to mind unfortunately) where the voice-over text is clearly done by a machine, but doing a fairly decent job of modulating inflexions to convey meaning (for a machine; I don't expect a TTS to be nearly as subtle or expressive as a human). I have no idea what apps are used for those though and I don't know what format text they read.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

My original point is more relevant when trying to detect a voice difference when text is wrapped in <i>, <em>, <b>, <strong> tags. I can't hear any difference. Perhaps this comment would have been better suited to that other recent thread discussing the merits of if/when you should use <em> rather than <i>, <strong> rather than <b>.

In those specific cases I would not necessarily expect an audible difference between em and i or strong and b, but there probably would be between em / i and <span class="italic"> or strong / b and <span class="bold">, because the spans are meaningless to the app. Or do you mean there is no difference between plain text and text with em / strong tags? In that case I guess it's just down to how well the app can synthesize speech, I really don't know how well emphasis is handled by speech synthesizers. I don't know of any specific TTS apps which are better than others but if you use twitter you could ask on the #eprdctn discussion, there are people there who can certainly tell you if there are any that stand out amongst the general-public apps. As I said I am approaching the question more from the perspective of accessibility for cases of visual handicap.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I did your experiment and I was correct. Removing the CSS makes it unreadable. Why would you want to remove the CSS anyway?

Did you do the experiment fully, comparing a book *with* semantic html to a book with just styled p tags? If you did, then you saw the dramatic difference between the two, and you should hopefully understand my point now. If you didn't and only looked at a book with styled p tags, then you only confirmed that that particular book was badly made. On the other hand if by "unreadable" you simply mean "not pretty in my opinion" then we are talking about two different things and I would disagree that "not aesthetically pleasing" is the same as "unreadable".

There are plenty of reasons to disactivate CSS if it doesn't work for your particular needs / preferences. I have personally disactivated the CSS (until I could fix the file properly) in books where the side-margins were defined in ems, for example, because they became too large and didn't leave enough room for the text. You might also want to disactivate the CSS if the person who made the book used low-contrast colours on the text and you are reading on a black-and-white device or are colour blind and cannot see those colours. Maybe the person who made the book chose unreadable (or just really ugly) fonts, or made the headings so much bigger than the body text that they won't fit on the screen, or put all the notes or captions in 0.6em size... those are all examples I've personally encountered in various commercial ebooks. Like I said, there are plenty of reasons and many that would never occur to me but are dealbreakers for someone else.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Mister L

Did you do the experiment fully, comparing a book *with* semantic html to a book with just styled p tags? If you did, then you saw the dramatic difference between the two, and you should hopefully understand my point now. If you didn't and only looked at a book with styled p tags, then you only confirmed that that particular book was badly made. On the other hand if by "unreadable" you simply mean "not pretty in my opinion" then we are talking about two different things and I would disagree that "not aesthetically pleasing" is the same as "unreadable".

There are plenty of reasons to disactivate CSS if it doesn't work for your particular needs / preferences. I have personally disactivated the CSS (until I could fix the file properly) in books where the side-margins were defined in ems, for example, because they became too large and didn't leave enough room for the text. You might also want to disactivate the CSS if the person who made the book used low-contrast colours on the text and you are reading on a black-and-white device or are colour blind and cannot see those colours. Maybe the person who made the book chose unreadable (or just really ugly) fonts, or made the headings so much bigger than the body text that they won't fit on the screen, or put all the notes or captions in 0.6em size... those are all examples I've personally encountered in various commercial ebooks. Like I said, there are plenty of reasons and many that would never occur to me but are dealbreakers for someone else.

If you deactivate the CSS you get the default for <p> which leaves large paragraph spaces. You get no indents. If the section breaks use something visual, it's no longer centered and is now on the left. If italics and bold are created using spans, you lose those too. Smallcaps are also gone. In most cases, offset text will no longer be offset. And there are other issues. So please stop saying the eBook is made wrong. It's not made wrong. It's some of the defaults when there is no CSS that makes the eBook unreadable. CSS is there to override some of the defaults so the eBook is readable. The problems you've seen that caused you to deactivate the CSS are very easy to fix. No need to deactivate the CSS until they can be fixed. They can be fixed very easily. Just use the Calibre editor or Sigil and you'll be fixed in not long at all.

[Jim Chapman]

Hi All,
Some of you may recognise me as the developer of the Freda e-reader app, which has been available on Windows for a very long time, and has been on Android for the past couple of years.

The thread interests me because I've lately been doing more work on:

• Properly parsing and applying CSS styles (using, believe it or not, my own hand-built xhtml renderer)
• EPUB3 compatibility (semantic markup, such as sections, and nav documents)
• Accessibility features (such as keyboard navigation by section and paragraph)
• Text-to-speech.

My new renderer comes with features (like Moon+ but perhaps a bit less daunting) to let you selectively turn of parts of the CSS styling (font selection, spacing, colour scheme). I would be very much interested to get feedback from the folks in this thread, regarding what Freda is getting right and wrong in this respect (and any other).

As regards the discussion on text-to-speech, so far, I didn't find any Android text-to-speech engines that give proper (or indeed any) treatment to the SSML emphasis tag. Whereas the Windows TTS engine does handle it reasonably sensibly.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Hi All,
Some of you may recognise me as the developer of the Freda e-reader app, which has been available on Windows for a very long time, and has been on Android for the past couple of years.

The thread interests me because I've lately been doing more work on:

• Properly parsing and applying CSS styles (using, believe it or not, my own hand-built xhtml renderer)
• EPUB3 compatibility (semantic markup, such as sections, and nav documents)
• Accessibility features (such as keyboard navigation by section and paragraph)
• Text-to-speech.

My new renderer comes with features (like Moon+ but perhaps a bit less daunting) to let you selectively turn of parts of the CSS styling (font selection, spacing, colour scheme). I would be very much interested to get feedback from the folks in this thread, regarding what Freda is getting right and wrong in this respect (and any other).

As regards the discussion on text-to-speech, so far, I didn't find any Android text-to-speech engines that give proper (or indeed any) treatment to the SSML emphasis tag. Whereas the Windows TTS engine does handle it reasonably sensibly.

It would be nice if your web site was updated to reflect android.

Dale

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It would be nice if your web site was updated to reflect android.

Dale

Fair comment. Mainly I rely on Windows Store, Google Play, and Google to steer people towards the app, but I ought to update that website some time, if only for the sake of completeness :-)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Hi All,
Some of you may recognise me as the developer of the Freda e-reader app, which has been available on Windows for a very long time, and has been on Android for the past couple of years.

Why did you go for Windows instead of iOS? Are you going to port to iOS anytime soon?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It would be nice if your web site was updated to reflect android.

Dale

It would be much nicer if there was an iOS version.

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why did you go for Windows instead of iOS? Are you going to port to iOS anytime soon?

At the time that I decided to do the Android port, I saw a lot of my users moving from Windows 10 Mobile to Android (and actually I personally was doing the same) - so I reckoned that most of the market for Freda would be people wanting an app that ran on Windows desktop/tablet and Android. An iOS port is possible in principle, because I used the Xamarin platform to build the Android port - and Xamarin does also support iOS. But in practice, it would probably take a couple of months of fairly concerted effort to get an iOS version of the app done.

Also I would, thanks to Apple's annoying policies, have to buy an Apple machine as a build-server.

So, up until now, the iOS build has been off the agenda because it would take a lot of time, and require me to spend a fair amount of money, and I'm not really sure how big a market there would be for an iOS Freda (Marvin is a *very good* alternative, and quite hard to beat).

But I am watching the Microsoft roadmap quite closely because .NET6/MAUI might offer a really straightforward way to move my Windows app over to iOS within the coming year.

In short: it may happen. Particularly if it becomes easier, or if I come to think there's a big market for it.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Mister L

<snip> ... Or do you mean there is no difference between plain text and text with em / strong tags? <snip>

Unfortunately, yes. For general purpose epub readers it doesn't seem to matter whether you use <i>, <em> or <span class="italic">. All 3 may be visually OK (italic) but as far as TTS is concerned they may as well be plain text for all the difference it makes.

BTW I'm not advocating against using semantically correct tags. In fact if I buy a book which uses <p> or <div> for headings I always change them to suitable <h?> tags as part of my clean-up workflow. But it's more a compulsion than an expectation of reaping any actual short-term benefits.

[d351r3d]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It would be much nicer if there was an iOS version.

I agree. Or Android. Not a fan of windows.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

As regards the discussion on text-to-speech, so far, I didn't find any Android text-to-speech engines that give proper (or indeed any) treatment to the SSML emphasis tag. Whereas the Windows TTS engine does handle it reasonably sensibly.

I've never seen any SSML tag in a purchased ebook. Who is creating them?

[Mister L]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If you deactivate the CSS you get the default for <p> which leaves large paragraph spaces. You get no indents. If the section breaks use something visual, it's no longer centered and is now on the left. If italics and bold are created using spans, you lose those too. Smallcaps are also gone. In most cases, offset text will no longer be offset. And there are other issues. So please stop saying the eBook is made wrong. It's not made wrong. It's some of the defaults when there is no CSS that makes the eBook unreadable. CSS is there to override some of the defaults so the eBook is readable. The problems you've seen that caused you to deactivate the CSS are very easy to fix. No need to deactivate the CSS until they can be fixed. They can be fixed very easily. Just use the Calibre editor or Sigil and you'll be fixed in not long at all.

Most of those are aesthetic complaints, and as I said previously, I don't agree that an unattractive book is necessarily unreadable, it's just not as pleasant an experience. For some people it might be preferable (in particular cases where the CSS makes the book literally unreadable, such as in the case of low-contrast colours for colour-blind people). I personally am able and willing to edit the code to fix a book to my liking. Not everyone is, and they shouldn't have to. However the question of whether semantic code is more correct than unsemantic code is not a question of opinion; it simply is the case. As you say, italics and bold made using spans disappear if you disactivate the CSS; that's not the case if they are properly made with semantic tags, which has been more or less my point from the beginning.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

Unfortunately, yes. For general purpose epub readers it doesn't seem to matter whether you use <i>, <em> or <span class="italic">. All 3 may be visually OK (italic) but as far as TTS is concerned they may as well be plain text for all the difference it makes.

Okay, sorry, I misunderstood. That is a shame.

Originally Posted by jackie_w

BTW I'm not advocating against using semantically correct tags. In fact if I buy a book which uses <p> or <div> for headings I always change them to suitable <h?> tags as part of my clean-up workflow. But it's more a compulsion than an expectation of reaping any actual short-term benefits.

For your own personal use, if you aren't bothered by it, then sure, there is no reason to worry about the code (unless you are compulsive. I share that compulsion so no judgement ). For professionals it's a different story; I am capable of fixing a book if it was so poorly made that it distracts me while reading, but I get pretty grumpy about having to fix someone else's work on a book I've spent money for.

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Hi All,
Some of you may recognise me as the developer of the Freda e-reader app, which has been available on Windows for a very long time, and has been on Android for the past couple of years.

The thread interests me because I've lately been doing more work on:

• Properly parsing and applying CSS styles (using, believe it or not, my own hand-built xhtml renderer)
• EPUB3 compatibility (semantic markup, such as sections, and nav documents)
• Accessibility features (such as keyboard navigation by section and paragraph)
• Text-to-speech.

My new renderer comes with features (like Moon+ but perhaps a bit less daunting) to let you selectively turn of parts of the CSS styling (font selection, spacing, colour scheme). I would be very much interested to get feedback from the folks in this thread, regarding what Freda is getting right and wrong in this respect (and any other).

As regards the discussion on text-to-speech, so far, I didn't find any Android text-to-speech engines that give proper (or indeed any) treatment to the SSML emphasis tag. Whereas the Windows TTS engine does handle it reasonably sensibly.

Very interesting, I look forward to testing your app. It's refreshing to see a developer taking care to support CSS and accessibility features.

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by d351r3d

I agree. Or Android. Not a fan of windows.

There is an Android version - just look for Freda in Google Play.