Ebook Reader Whinge

[jislizard]

Just got my GP2X hand delivered to Oz, thanks to my sister for that, and had a chance to update it and finaly find out what yous* have all been complaining about, fixed the white line/split screen problem, will attempt to move the joystick later, will buy a card reader and a new card, apart from that I have to say it is a nice bit of kit, of course if it had been bought from a high street shop and made by a mainstream company I would have taken it straight back.

Anyway, I was using the pdf viewer to read ebooks, very nice but too fiddly scrolling left and right to be of much use to me so I have converted them into text documents.

Much easier to read but now I found that it chops up words when it gets to the end of a line, this is not a major problem and I don't want all the Devs to drop what they are doing on the emulators to get to work on this problem but if anyone has a few hours to spare to fix this problem I am sure that myself and the other <1% of GP2X users that aren't using this for games would be very grateful.

I used the search and 7sark7, (any relative of the Battle of the Planets 7sark7?), was thinking of porting another ebook reader, any news? Checked the archives, nothing there.

Cheers


*yous, australian plural for you. Fantastic! can't think why I have never used this before

 

[slygamer]

My mother always told me not to say "youse", as well as "dat" (as in, "For Chiristmas I want dat and dat and dat..."). Being Australian myself, I should be saying "mate", "grouse" and "barbie", but to me a "mate" is what you call someone in a pub when you can't remember their name, "grouse" is some kind of feathered bird, and "barbie" is an awfully thin plastic doll that is fun to pull apart. I was once involved in making a Barbie game for the PC and Mattel sent us a carton of Barbie dolls "for reference purposes". Those plastic dolls very quickly got cannibalised, shaved, tattooed, you name it.

 

[jislizard]

Just picking up the lingo so I don't stand out too much, as if the bright red skin doesn't give it away.

I've seen barbies dipped up to their necks in black liquid latex, it's a sick, sick world, but strangly exciting.

Slightly off topic but it wasn't a very interesting one anyway

 

[7zark7]

i am looking at it , depends on two things really ...

1) demand for such a beast , i think there is

2) who is going to help me , i am a windows programmer by default, so could do with somebody to bounce things off.

Mark

 

[Muncher666]

My mother always told me not to say "youse",

​

Your mother was very wise.

Allan. (melbourne, australia)

 

[remowilliams]

Yeah the word split is just awful. It makes reading text really hard on the eyes.

I would very much like to see an improved e-text reader as well.

 

[nubie]

Yeah the word split is just awful.  It makes reading text really hard on the eyes.

I would very much like to see an improved e-text reader as well.

​

I just went and got cream/vim package for windows, it lets you set a word wrap and then save it to a file.

Use Linux/Unix type returns, I don't know if the reader supports Windows type.

I found it much easier to use, and I have completed reading an entire novel with mine, Starship Titanic, based on the video game by Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Dirk Gently fame).

I set my word wrap to about 53 characters.

 

[dennis20014]

Yea that annoys me too but I'm sure soon it'll be fixed. I haven't tried the pdf viewer yet even though I have it on my SD card B)

 

[remowilliams]

I just went and got cream/vim package for windows, it lets you set a word wrap and then save it to a file.

​

Good idea. I just tried it, but when I wrap it, it turns everything into one huge monolithic block and obliterates the paragraph breaks. Any way around that?

 

[nubie]

I just went and got cream/vim package for windows, it lets you set a word wrap and then save it to a file.

​

Good idea. I just tried it, but when I wrap it, it turns everything into one huge monolithic block and obliterates the paragraph breaks. Any way around that?

​

That's strange, I just checked my Starship Titanic and it had all the returns.

I went to Format, File Format . . . and it said convert from Dos type to,

I guess it was dos formatted then.

Just checked using Notepad2 and used View, Show line endings (Ctrl+Shift+9)
it shows [CR][LF] style returns.

If you go to File, Line Endings you will see how it looks in Unix and Mac format.

I guess the reader uses standard windows format then, sorry my mistake.

 

[remowilliams]

I think I've got it fixed up. I used word to add extra CR/LFs to split the paragraph marks and have then survive the "auto wrap". Looks good so far. Cream/vim was the important piece I needed for the wrapping

 

[Ravnos]

The problem I have is that all my txt ebooks are already formatted, so even if I set the word wrap lower using a text editor,
I would wind up
with paragraphs that wrap like this. I think the whole thing would
be kind of
awkward. But I guess that the words wouldn't split over mult
iple lines like they do now.

I've been thinking of writing a simple app that would unformat it and reformat it, but motivation is a real bitch to come by these days.

 

[hitbyambulance]

i've been waiting for a better text reader on the GP2X as well...

 

[7zark7]

what i would like as i read a lot of books , would be software that reads pdb and txt files initially. I have done some investigative work and it would appear that with SDL i can use TTF fonts which would be nice.

I think there is enough code out there in the wild to write something new rather than port something existing, i guess what i need to do is get my head around gcc more, i have got the demo to compile and modified it to do some other non interesting stuff , so that works.

I can do two things, dive in at the deep end and try with SDL and TTF etc or perhaps try to write something better which works along the same lines as the inbuilt reader but better with those odd fonts. (is this the standard output , does anybody know ??).

Anyway any ideas or suggestions please post them to this thread.

7zark7

 

[jislizard]

I can do two things, dive in at the deep end and try with SDL and TTF etc or perhaps try to write something better which works along the same lines as the inbuilt reader but better with those odd fonts. (is this the standard output , does anybody know ??).

Anyway any ideas or suggestions please post them to this thread.

7zark7

​

Well I don't think anyone is in a desperate hurry so if you have the ability to code a text reader specificaly for the GP2X instead of porting somethingelse then go for it. If nothingelse it will be a good practice.

There are enough bugs with the inbuilt reader, strange characters, word splitting, odd formatting to make it worthwhile starting from scratch, which is good coming from someone that won't be doing the work. Plus you get to call it 7Zark7's ebook reader or something.

 

[Ravnos]

There's an ebook (well, txt file) reader for NDS that might do what you're looking for. You can find it here, but there's no source. You could probably ask the dev, he might be receptive if you ask nicely.

 

[donny662]

I get the ebooks from Project Gutenberg; they are plain text files with line breaks at 80 characters or so. I use a program called Interparse to get rid of the line breaks except at the end of a paragraph, then I add blank lines between paragraphs. Next, I use Word to save with line breaks, but I've been looking for a free program that will save the line breaks as I've been using my parent's computer which has Word, so I will try vim to get rid of my Microsoft Office dependency.

 

[7zark7]

thanks for the pointer to the DS version, to make reusing somebody elses code worthwhile though it would have to be a version which is using SDL on unix.

otherwise i am quicker writing it myself. I have managed to get SDL_ttf downloaded and compiling a gpe with a reference to the SDL_ttf header file works, my problem is that i dont know GCC and i struggle with makefiles and also where to put things (libs , header files etc etc) rather than the actual code its very fustrating for somebody who is just used to sitting down and battering things out LOL.

Painfully slow at the moment but there is progress.

7zark7

 

[Oscaruzzo]

As a quick temporary solution for the Project Gutenberg texts, one can use the unix command "fmt" to reformat the texts, this way

cat original.txt | fmt -w 60 > formatted.txt

then you can view the formatted file on the gp2x. "60" should be text width on the gp2x screen (i don't know the real value). The text should have unix-style end of lines (the dos2unix command can fix those).

Of course, having a decent, proportionally spaced, justified, and maybe even hyphenated display would be MUCH better ;-)

 

[Oscaruzzo]

Of course, having a decent, proportionally spaced, justified, and maybe even hyphenated display would be MUCH better ;-)

​

BTW, a fixed-spaced justified and hyphenated text can be obtained SOMETIMES with this crock

MANPAGER=cat MANWIDTH=60 man ./original.txt > formatted.txt

Again, substitute "60" with whatever is appropriate on the gp2x...