FBReader has shipped

[andymulhearn]

I just downloaded and installed the first public build of FBReader and I have to admit to being pretty impressed. It opened a plucker file I have on my 770 and displayed it very nicely, both in normal and full screen mode.

My two greatest problems with Plucker are not there - scrolling and forgetting where you are in the book - which is a major result as far as I am concerned

There's lots of settings to play with, but I have some work to do so that will need to wait :( but all-in-all a nice addition to the software.

[tobi]

http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

[RogerS]

Hm-m-m. The Application Catalog lists that page too, but this morning it's still showing the message that FBReader for Maemo is not yet available. (But now it IS. See next post.)

Hope Misha didn't run into a last-minute snag. It's a great reader. See topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/fbreader-captures.htm (http://topicalweb.com/making-ebooks/fbreader-captures.htm) for some indication of what the reader looks like.

Edited to add:
More info in the blog item at www.internettablettalk.com/blog/?p=176 (http://www.internettablettalk.com/blog/?p=176) which points to those screen captures.
and: See next post.

[jaycee]

Hm-m-m. The Application Catalog lists that page too, but this morning it's still showing the message that FBReader for Maemo is not yet available.
http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/ shows a .deb download now.

[Hedgecore]

Now all that's needed is speech synthesis. C'mon, the C64 did it with SAM.

Out of curiosity, are eBooks rendered or stored as text?

[andymulhearn]

Now all that's needed is speech synthesis. C'mon, the C64 did it with SAM.

Out of curiosity, are eBooks rendered or stored as text?

Depends what format you use. FBReader reads Plucker format which is encoded in some way, and a whole host of others:

fb2 e-book format (style attributes are not supported yet).
Html format (text-only, tables are not supported).
plucker format (embedded images are supported, tables are not supported).
Palmdoc (aportis doc).
zTxt (Weasel format).
Plain text format.
Direct reading from tar, zip and gzip archives. (Multiple books in one archive are supported).

From: http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/

[gultig]

Now all that's needed is speech synthesis. C'mon, the C64 did it with SAM.

Out of curiosity, are eBooks rendered or stored as text?

Flite (http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalogWip#head-4ed27aa207668171573e4afdf0031b0f073d4fed) has been ported to the 770 along with some other text to speech utilities.

Can't get it to output directly to the soundcard yet (makes a wav file instead), but I know the developer is working on it.

[RogerS]

This is really interesting.

I downloaded the arm binary but couldn't get anything to work. I don't think I got as far as making a wav file.

But TTS on a handheld with e-books is a wonderful possibility. I, let the record show (somewhere, can't track it down), said (eg, wrote) within the last month or so that it would likely be some years before TTS could be squeezed into the 770's space.

How great it is to be proven wrong! And so quickly! I would resign from the punditocracy in shame if only really-wrong predictions were allowed as a reason . . .

Roger

[Hedgecore]

Well, if worse came to worse, they could always port SAM from the C64. :rolleyes: It sounds no different than Stephen Hawking and didn't even take up the full 640 blocks on the disk. Blocks. *feels the wave of nostalgia*

[zupidupi]

Excellent, yet another way of using my 770. Tell me, where could I find a good supply of (hopefully free) e-books?

Wonders Zup

[RogerS]

There are lots of places, but the best places to start are

Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org/ (http://www.gutenberg.org/)) and

The Online Books Page
digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/)

Gutenberg will even output its texts in Plucker format.

[zupidupi]

Excellent, having a huge collection of Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer and Mark Twain on the tablet makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Tell me, am I just unfocused, or is there really no way of changing the font size in fbreader?

[RogerS]

Oh, sure you can change fonts.

Three points:

- You can choose any font that's installed in the system.

- When it's clear how to install fonts into the system (there's no tool at present; shouldn't be a big barrier to doing this), you can use whatever font you really, really want

- You can choose font, italic, bold (that is, either, neither or both), size and hyphenation (on for text, say, and off for headlines) by the "style" -- and style here is used as MS Word uses it, to mean functional roles in the document, including such things as text paragraph, title, section title, subtitle, epigraph, footnote, verse, hyperlink, and so on.

In other words, beyond any other e-book reader, and even beyond what browsers offer.

If you go to the FBReader for Maemo page, there's a link to a page of screenshots (http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/fonts.html) of the different options for the program. You can see the Style options at http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/maemo/styles-font.png

[zupidupi]

Oh yeah, it was just me being unfocused :p . I missed the remaining tabs, sneakily hidden away on the Settings-dialogue. Now everything is much better.

Tell me, which combination of background color and text color would prove least straining to the eye? The white/black-combination is rather natural, of course, but it is a bit too bright for my liking. I experimented with some other settings (a creamy kind of white, or alternatively a grey background) which were slightly better but I suspect there's even better combos. And I don't think I'd like the classic terminal combination of having bright green on black!

Also: I downloaded Alice in Wonderland and Dracula from http://www.chuggnutt.com/ebook_category.php. They were in pdb-format which sounded nice - no Gutenberg-conversion (though it has worked rather well). Unfortunately the fbreader wasn't able to open them, in fact, it didn't even list them when I tried to add them to the library. And the reader did find other books (converted from Gutenberg) in the same directory. Does anybody else manage to open and read these books?

Grateful for any suggestion and explanations.

Zup

[andymulhearn]

Also: I downloaded Alice in Wonderland and Dracula from http://www.chuggnutt.com/ebook_category.php. They were in pdb-format which sounded nice - no Gutenberg-conversion (though it has worked rather well). Unfortunately the fbreader wasn't able to open them, in fact, it didn't even list them when I tried to add them to the library. And the reader did find other books (converted from Gutenberg) in the same directory. Does anybody else manage to open and read these books?

Unfortunately those books are formatted for the Palm Reader from eReader and are not Plucker format.

It's confusing that Plucker and Palm share the same file type :(