[Archived] Marvin ePub reader for iPad

[kguil]

An honest question... what does Bluefire have (except DRM) that Marvin already doesn't?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

By the way Faterson, at your request, I have written to the designer of Volkhov asking him if he's planning a Cyrillic version. He said that he'd consider starting a Kickstarter project for it.

I'll try and find and add some cool Cyrillic fonts for the next version.

Please add in Charis SIL. It's free and a very nice font. It has a wide range of character sets that are very good for ePub.

[kguil]

You're right. It's a beautiful font. I'll experiment with it and try to add it to the very next update.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

An honest question... what does Bluefire have (except DRM) that Marvin already doesn't?

Bluefire has the ability to respect the CSS formatting of an ePub thus, when the ePub's CSS has a text indent of 0, it's respected, when it has no paragraph indents, it's respected. It means that I get an epub on screen that I can actually read.

I cannot read ePub that has paragraph spaces. That's the biggest issue I have with Marvin. There is currently no way to fix this serious issue with any of the options. So while Marvin has a lot of nice options, I cannot actually use it.

Another issue is embedded fonts. A book like 11/22/63 is much better read with Bluefire because the way the ePub is formatted, it uses embedded fonts heavily and works very well. Without the embedded fonts, might as well be reading a straight text file.

I am hoping Marvin can be better then Bluefire.

[kguil]

Ok. I'll make sure the update is released as soon as humanly possible. I've added lots of new stuff over the holidays including some deep "under the hood" changes to the layout engine. I'll have to make sure to test it properly before getting it out.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

Hi fekhner, that is something I definitely want to do. However, so far I haven't looked at ePub 3 seriously. After the next few updates are out, I'll probably start working on an iPhone version. ePub 3 is something I've scheduled after that.

ePub 3 support (IMHO) should be at the bottom of the list of things to do. There are so few apps/programs to handle ePub 3 and nobody actually sells ePub 3 formatted eBooks. So adding support would be a waste of time (at the moment).

[JSWolf]

Another suggestion is ADE style page numbers along with the Marvin style page numbers. That way, we can use Marvin to get a page count that matches apps/programs/readers that use ADE.

[kguil]

Yes Jon, ePub 3 is currently low priority.

Does anyone have any pointers to some technical info related to ADE page numbers?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

Thanks for your feedback Jon,

Some comments...

0. Please do not wait uil 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.

So the best we can do then is once you are done is hope Apple isn't too slow about getting the update released. Please keep us updated as to when the next version is sent to Apple so we can begin to wait.

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

Thank you!

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.

Thank you!

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.

Thank you!

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

Too large was not the right way to say it. But any chance of reducing the margins to use as much of the screen for the book's text would be a major help on an iPhone.

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.

How about an advanced option with all the different advanced options and a simple layout for those that find the advanced options too much?

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

Thank you!

6. Embedded fonts should be supported.

Thank you! I have some eBooks that have embedded fonts that are subsetted so they don't include characters in the fonts that are not in the ePub. If you would like, I can send you an ePub that has this (using Charis SIL) as the font so you can test that this works as well. It's using the new font subsetting that Calibre now has.

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

I know there is a bar to show progress, but can you also show page numbers for the entire book something like this...

page 139 3 pages left in chapter 138 pages left in the book 277 total pages

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.

I look forward to that.

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

I did come up with an iea for that that would be simple. Just use 3-5 save sets and all one has to do is select which numbered save set to save to and which to restore from. No need for filenames and other complex things. Just a click of the button or two to save, delete, or restore a save set.

I was editing my message when you replied. So here is what I added between when you replied and when I finished my edits.

1. ToC (ncx) support.

Is there a way to go back to the beginning of an ePub without having to flip pages to get there?

I have more suggestions...

1. In the font section, please allow the user deigned fonts for serif, sans-serif, and monospace. I have a book I am reading that uses sans-serif and they get overridden at present. The CSS code is "font-family: sans-serif". They are coming out as serif because of the chosen body font.

2. The gestures that allow us to go back/forward should go to the beginning of the chapter not to the last page and then onto the chapter's first page. Also, make gesturing to goto bookmarks separate from chapters.

3. I have figured out how to get true smallcaps as long as you have them for a given font. I have a smallcaps version of Charis SIL and what could be done is to have the CSS define "font-family: monospace" or "sans-serif" and in the font selector, select the smallcaps font for monospace or sans-serif and it's a go.

4. Be able to pull ePub out of iBooks and Blurefire. That would be a very neat trick to be able to copy eBooks from other reading apps into Marvin.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by kguil

Yes Jon, ePub 3 is currently low priority.

Does anyone have any pointers to some technical info related to ADE page numbers?

In the Calibre plugins forum (on MR) is a thread about the Count Pages plugin. You could PM the author on this since Count Pages can count the way ADE counts. Or you could download the plugin and have a look at the code. It's written in Python.

[kguil]

In the Calibre plugins forum (on MR) is a thread about the Count Pages plugin. You could PM the author on this since Count Pages can count the way ADE counts. Or you could download the plugin and have a look at the code. It's written in Python.

Cool. I'll look at that.

[FredipusRex]

For font resources, you might want to take a look at openfontlibrary.org - they have some nice SIL licensed fonts. Old Standard serif is especially designed for classicists and linguists (designed for Cyrillic, Greek and Latin), Circus is quite nice and supports just about everything. News Cycle and Linear Regular are nice sans serif fonts (not 100% happy with the kerning on Linear).

Keep up the good work and to some of the other commenters, please try to be a little more appreciative and a little less demanding. Some of the comments border on petulant - considering how responsive Kris has been over the holidays and how many changes he's made in days, having to wait a week or two for testing and app approval is nothing short of astonishing speed! Compared to the dev cycles of other apps, it might as well be instantaneous...

[kguil]

So...

1. ToC (ncx) support.

I'm not sure what you mean. Marvin uses the ncx to generate the TOC.

Is there a way to go back to the beginning of an ePub without having to flip pages to get there?

You can drag the scrubbing tool at the bottom all the way to the left.

I have more suggestions...

1. In the font section, please allow the user deigned fonts for serif, sans-serif, and monospace. I have a book I am reading that uses sans-serif and they get overridden at present. The CSS code is "font-family: sans-serif". They are coming out as serif because of the chosen body font.

Interesting. I'll post my ideas for doing this on this thread before working on it to make sure it is what everyone is expecting.

2. The gestures that allow us to go back/forward should go to the beginning of the chapter not to the last page and then onto the chapter's first page.

The problem with this is that many people, prefer the current behaviour and many people prefer what you're suggesting. Will try and make gestures a bit more customisable.

Also, make gesturing to goto bookmarks separate from chapters.

Definitely. Very useful.

3. I have figured out how to get true smallcaps as long as you have them for a given font. I have a smallcaps version of Charis SIL and what could be done is to have the CSS define "font-family: monospace" or "sans-serif" and in the font selector, select the smallcaps font for monospace or sans-serif and it's a go.

I'm not sure I'm following. Could you elaborate?

[kguil]

Hi FredipusRex. Rather than building lots and lots of fonts into Marvin, I'll be working on a cool way to allow users to import theirs.

On the other hand... there are some lovely fonts at openfontlibrary.org. I'm considering adding a nice sans serif to the very next release together with Charis. Any preferred ones? Ideally they should come in Regular, Bold, Italic and BoldItalic styles.

[FredipusRex]

While it's not my favorite design, Pfennig supports almost everything - all four styles and nearly every language available. Circus (aka Libertinage) is a family of inter-related serif fonts that have a very broad range as well.