Freda Ebook Reader for Windows and Android

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

how do I get the Windows app to update?

Not a dumb question at all; Microsoft do not really explain it adequately. Start the Microsoft Store app on your PC, and click the ... item at the top right of the screen (next to the little 'person' icon). Choose 'Downloads and Updates'.
You will see a list of recent updates that have been applied to your Store apps. You may see that Freda has already been automatically updated (in that case it will show version 4.34). If not, then you can click the 'get updates' button to trigger the Store to go and look for updates - it should find a Freda update (if not now, then some time in the next 48 hours).

When you launch Freda, it should (the first time you run it) pop up a window summarising the features in the update. You can see that window again any time you want, from the main menu, by choosing support->release notes.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Not a dumb question at all; Microsoft do not really explain it adequately. Start the Microsoft Store app on your PC, and click the ... item at the top right of the screen (next to the little 'person' icon). Choose 'Downloads and Updates'.
You will see a list of recent updates that have been applied to your Store apps. You may see that Freda has already been automatically updated (in that case it will show version 4.34). If not, then you can click the 'get updates' button to trigger the Store to go and look for updates - it should find a Freda update (if not now, then some time in the next 48 hours).

When you launch Freda, it should (the first time you run it) pop up a window summarising the features in the update. You can see that window again any time you want, from the main menu, by choosing support->release notes.

Thank you, that did the trick.

I'm hoping to provide you with some feedback from the POV of a Windows user who would like to see as much of the epub's own CSS honoured as possible with the added benefit of TTS whilst still looking at a nicely styled book. Since MSEdge gave up on epub-with-TTS I've missed this option.

[Jim Chapman]

UPDATE 22nd July: I've made a further update, to address some reported issues with books that had been open before the 4.34 update, and were now not displaying correctly. The issue was caused by corruption of the app's cache files.

If you see any problems, that this update does not fix, please email for support, or post here.

[Jim Chapman]

• Reworked the CSS code, to handle long chains of selectors better, and to deal with pseudos more correctly (:nth-child variants and :not, in particular).
• Fixed a bug affecting the specificity of the lower border style of tables (and other things)
• Text-to-speech no longer applies emphasis (the Android TTS engines ignore the SSML emphasis tag, and the Windows TTS engine pronounces emphasis in a way that no-one could like)
• Improved the reliability of loading bookmarks/highlights created by earlier versions of Freda: when loading bookmarks / highlights, if the number of words in the chapter does not match the saved numbers, and if there is a CFI available, use that rather than trying to interpolate a new word position.
• The ‘download’ action on a book that has a ‘folder’ source will no longer delete the book (because we won’t be able to get to the file again, because system permissions). It will now just clear and refresh all the cache files.
• The ‘copy to clipboard’ function now includes new-lines for paragraph breaks.
• (Android) Fix an issue seen with Gutenberg, around https downloads, caused by the use of an untrusted certificate by Gutenberg.
• (Android) Fix problem with Dropbox login (by switching to using the system browser and a custom URI scheme)
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: When the selected text range is cleared, keep it hanging around in the background, so that if the user does something ‘resumey’ it will start with that selection, not the first word on the page. ‘something resumey’ would mean hitting an arrow key for example.
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: Images are selectable, and when selected they say their image description alt text (via the speak-selected-text setting, and/or Narrator, and/or read-aloud).
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: Image viewer control shows the media description alt text content, if there is any.
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: Dialog boxes announce their names when displayed. The close button, when selected says ‘close popup <dialog name>”.
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: Reader page control button says the name of the book, and “reader page controls”.
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: Reader page control ribbons buttons and close/minimise/pin/unpin buttons now say something making it clear which ribbon and which function they represent.
• (Windows) Accessibility fix: added an item to the ‘accessible’ menu, to do ‘go back to bookshelf’.

[Jim Chapman]

• Render PDF files, displaying the pages as PNG images, using the built-in Windows and Android PDF components.
• Better fallback logic for cases where the advanced parser barfs; first try simplified layout, then try flattened – which should basically just emit the text without formatting or aligning it in any way at all
• Fix 'float' and 'clear' logic to align better with CSS standards (e.g. force a move below the float(s) in response to an applicable 'clear'). Generally trying to do the best job I can, without (yet) implementing the Block Formatting Context in all its gory horror.
• Better handling of block elements embedded inside inline elements.
• Better treatment of start-of-paragraph in justified text.
• (Android) Ask for permission when it's required for storage card access / save log file / backup (save/restore/merge)
• BUG FIX: When the Mobi-parser (or any other thing) creates an epub having elements with HTML that sets width and height attributes, ignore these, unless they are on images. Such attributes should only be set by CSS not by HTML.
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fix an issue with multi-line text boxes – where keyboard characters like []{}\|’@#~ were getting ignored.
• BUG FIX: Fix odd behaviour (and some stack overflow crashes) with getting/selecting paragraphs, sentences and sections, including when this is done by the 'read aloud' function.
• BUG FIX: ‘Read Aloud’ function now starts at the beginning of the selected text (a regression bug meant that it was starting from the start of the paragraph instead)
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fixed an issue where the BookReaderPage menu ribbons would get into in a funny state, where they can’t be popped out (because they immediately close again).

[Jim Chapman]

• Implemented CSS ‘position’ attribute values ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’.
• Implemented CSS attribute background-image: url("path/to/image.ext").
• Forced the read-aloud language code to always be just two letters (so EN-AU becomes EN for instance), which avoids the issue that a possibly reasonable language is getting left off the list of available languages.
• ‘text-to-speech applies emphasis’ is an optional setting, default no. Because Microsoft’s default voices produce an idiotic drawl when reading emphasised text.
• ‘text-to-speech pronounces image descriptions’ is an optional setting, default yes. Because sometimes a book has all sorts of rubbish in images’ alt-text, and we don’t want to hear it read out.
• Implemented ‘advanced rendering’ behaviour for TXT and FB2 books, so that the CFI-saving of bookmarks works for them too (I will eventually want to get rid of the legacy rendering mode altogether – and need to be forward-compatible with this change).
• For Android only (because Windows UWP apps don't have multiple TTS engines), added a dropdown to choose which text-to-speech engine will be used, if there are several of them installed.
• PDF pages can optionally have their margins trimmed (i.e. cut down to the rectangle containing non-white pixels).
• Implemented a special ‘settings to use for this book only’ preset. It appears in the preset list, with a name like "for current book" which you can save settings to, or load (if you wanted to restore some setting you'd changed). When you come to re-open the book, Freda looks to see whether you've previously saved a "for current book" preset for it, and if so, Freda will load it. [potential gotcha – there’s no easy way to make this preset ‘unload’ when you subsequently aren’t reading this particular book]
• Image viewer: Now provides a ‘rotate 90 degrees’ button, and on Windows, a full-screen view and add accessible controls / buttons for zoom in/out and pan.
• Added a setting to tell text-to-speech to 'skip' some characters (noting that ~ * _ seem to be particularly annoying).
• When a ‘folder’ or ‘storage card’ book source is created, it now gets a default label that’s localised into the right language. [note: storage card exists only on Android]
• Bug Fix: The code for squeezing table columns to fit their content is not working (it's giving up when floats were present, failing to account for margin/padding on image elements … )
• Bug Fix: (Android) Windows-1251 and 1252 encodings are not working (it needed a change to the .NET build options for the project, to make it work in Release builds)
• Bug Fix: Read-aloud is failing to proceed to the next chapter in some cases (in fact, when the chapter begins with a paragraph consisting only of non-selectable ‘formatting’ images.
• Bug Fix: The margin of left-floating elements is applied wrongly to the ‘float formatting context’ meaning that it can over-write the content that is meant to be floating round it to the right.
• Bug Fix: The width of a floated image should default to the actual width of the image in the file, rather than the layout-width of the block containing it.
• Bug Fix: (Windows) When GoogleDrive redirects to an app-specific URL in its auth workflow, it uses the same URL for Freda, Freda+ and Freda-Chinese. So if more than one of them is installed, the results will be random, and not very nice. The three apps should use three different uri schemes.

[Jim Chapman]

• Refactored the Book Source classes, to make a better separation between ViewModel and Model code.
  
• Fixed DropBox authentication / authorisation to use the new ‘refresh token’ workflow and the PKCE auth flow. Note: Some time in ~ Sep 2021 existing DropBox users will be forced to reauthenticate (because their access tokens will expire, and they will need to obtain a refresh token, in order to refresh them). There does not seem to be a good way around that problem.
  
• Fixed the CSS loader so it will also load sheets referenced by @import directives.
  
• Fixed the CSS parser to handle pseudos like :not([foo]).
  
• Added a special case to the renderer, so as not to render elements that are explicitly assigned height=1px (they are placeholders, and should be treated a bit like ‘display=none’).
  
• Added support for MathML, by converting MathML to SVG.
  
• Made my ‘advancedrenderingoverridesmargins’ setting a bit more comprehensive (ignore margins, padding, line spacing and page breaks in all their forms).
  
• BUG FIX: OPDS reader was inadvertently consuming some elements, which meant that the Ubooquity OPDS feed did not work.
  
• BUG FIX (Android): SVG image scaling was wrong (didn't account for device pixel scale correctly).
  
• BUG FIX: background image scaling was sometimes distorting the background image when tiling the background.
  
• WORK-AROUND: (Android) Addressed, for now, the problem with access to local files and storage card folders, by adding android:requestLegacyExternalStorage="true" in the <application … > declaration in the manifest file, so that the scoped external storage restrictions won’t apply to Freda just yet.

[Jim Chapman]

• BUG FIX: some cases causing app crashes on Windows and Android.
• (Android) Updated to use Google UserMessagingPlatform to manage user consent for advertising cookies
• (Windows) Switched to Pubfinity for providing advertising and managing user consent

[Quoth]

I won't install an app or program that requires cookies for adverts. That is invasion of privacy and far worse than adverts.

I'm not keen on installing ANYTHING with built in advertising either. Tracking is Far FAR worse and should be illegal, no offer of consent. I paid Amazon to remove adverts from Kindles. The Kindles were bought locally and only the versions with adverts are sold in local retail.

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I won't install an app or program that requires cookies for adverts. That is invasion of privacy and far worse than adverts.

I'm not keen on installing ANYTHING with built in advertising either. Tracking is Far FAR worse and should be illegal, no offer of consent. I paid Amazon to remove adverts from Kindles. The Kindles were bought locally and only the versions with adverts are sold in local retail.

I see your point, but I do think you're being rather unfair here. After all the whole point of the consent screens is to allow you tell the app that you're withholding (or withdrawing) your consent to cookies and/or tracking - and in that case you will see generic, non-targeted advertising.

Or, in the case of Freda, you always have the option of paying to remove advertising - or installing the paid-for Freda+ app which does not display advertising in the first place.

I can quite understand that you'd prefer to pay for an app, so as to avoid having to see advertising and/or letting advertisers track your activity. I personally feel the same way. But some people feel differently, and it seems best to me to let them have it their way if that's what they prefer.

[stjoe]

Hi,

Want to know if Freda Android makes a copy of book when I use local folder as source?

If yes, then it will take up double space for book that I already have in local folder.

Thank you

[Jim Chapman]

Originally Posted by stjoe

Hi,

Want to know if Freda Android makes a copy of book when I use local folder as source?

If yes, then it will take up double space for book that I already have in local folder.

Thank you

Yes, it does. It's hard to avoid doing this, because of the way that Android deals with file permissions - generally, Android only gives an app like Freda a temporary permission to read a file when the user chooses that file via a file-picker popup window. That means Freda has to copy the file, because otherwise when Freda needs to access it again (the next time you open the book) it won't be allowed to.
Google allows for certain special app types (media players, photo editors) to be given permanent permission to access certain special folders (your music folder, your photos folder), but Freda is not that kind of app (and Google doesn't provide a special folder for ebooks).

[stjoe]

Thank you Jim for speedy response

Now I have better understanding how Freda manages the local source books

I want to ask about the search function in local folder source, it seems could not locate the book if it is in the subfolder. Is that the case?

The issue I am facing because I mirror the whole Calibre folder from my PC to my Android phone so I can take all my books with me all the time. But when I tried to search a book in local source, Freda seems could not find it.

I have to go to specific subfolder where the book stored and click on that book to open it using Freda.

Any tool out there can act as front-end which can display all books and their covers that seamlessly work with Freda as the reader? The same way that Calibre in PC works, if I click a book in Calibre, it will open the reader I chose which is Freda for Windows.

Thanks

[Jim Chapman]

I don't know any tool that can display cover images, but if you just want a tool that lets you view the files in a folder, and search a folder structure and list all the files whose names match some pattern, I'd recommend 'Simple File Manager Pro' (paid for, but not expensive, considering how useful it is). When you tap on an EPUB file in that app, it will open it using Freda.

Another possible approach would be to just keep all your books in Freda (and use the Freda library features for filtering, sorting, tagging and grouping books). Freda does understand the tags created by Calibre. There is one limitation that might be important: Freda will not allow you to keep more than a thousand books in its library.

Alternatively, Freda does understand how to access a Calibre library stored on another machine - so you might try setting up a 'Calibre' book source on your Android phone, and pointing that at the book collection stored on your PC (there are instructions here for how to set that up: http://www.turnipsoft.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=7 ).
There are some catches, though. Firstly, this will only work when your PC is turned on. Secondly, will only work when your phone can reach your PC over the network. When you're using WiFi at home that will probably work easily enough, but if you want your phone to access your PC while away from home, you'll have some tricky network configuration to do.

[Quoth]

KOReader (download apk from git), Lithium & Pocketbook don't seem to copy the files. Many Android apps do (Bluefire, Aldiko).

Nor does Musicolet (mp3 songs & audiobooks) or Folderplayer.