The One with the Thoughts of Frans

As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.

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Traditionally, September cheese is made in — you guessed it — September. This is when the grass and milk are at their best. We hope this release won’t take as long to ripen though.

This month the keyboard sports a new coat of paint (#8089), and crengine (the EPUB renderer) has received various improvements (#8165, #8197).

The Evernote plugin has been deprecated due to changes in the Evernote API. It has been replaced by the more generically named Exporter plugin, which supports Joplin, HTML, and plain text export (#7983).

Logo credit: @bubapet

We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:

• WebDAV: Handle non-self-closing tag for empty collection (#8121) @johnbeard
• Kindle: don’t kill kb service on start (#8122) @hius07
• [plugin] Change OPDS filetype algorithm to extension first, mimetype second (#8115) @Frenzie
• VirtualKeyboard: redesign and enhancements (#8089) @MoreFoxBeans @mergen3107
  • Virtual keyboard: default layout, compact mode (#8142) @hius07
  • Keyboard preferred layouts: usability fixes (#8159) @hius07
• [UX] HE keyboard: Use updated symbols from new layout (#8131) @yparitcher
• Various WebDAV fixes (#8121, #8137, #8138) @johnbeard
• [plugin] Exporter plugin without evernote (#7983) @pazos
• Paged documents can now be controlled through Dispatcher (#7671) @yparitcher
• calibre: gui to choose default extension (#8146) @pazos
• crengine: support for ‘box-sizing’, and other fixes (#8165) @poire-z
  Includes among others:
  • (Upstream) Various CHM handling fixes, and others
  • HTML documents: rebuild TOC from headings after load
  • Font: use metrics for underline offset and thickness
  • epub.css, html5.css: tweak ruby styling
  • CSS: fix EPUB’s head>style content encoding
  • CSS: add support for ‘box-sizing: content-box/border-box’
  • CSS: support for styling the element
    Also bump KoboUSBMS to v1.2.2 and FBInk to v1.24.0.
    ReaderFont’s “Generate font test document”: update the generated HTML so its ToC is build from proper HTML headings.
• Footer: add Warmth as footer item (#8060) @zwim
• Style tweaks: add a few ruby specific tweaks (#8189) @poire-z @davidvelosa
• crengine: CSS: parse/skip at-rules (#8197) @poire-z
• Readersearch: add button to recall search input dialog (#8190) @hius07
• Add passwordless wifi support (#8196) @Mel-kior
• Fix OPDS plugin bug wherein Arxiv PDF document acquisition URLs are not given a callback to download (#8210) @roygbyte
• [plugin] NewsDownloader: fix XML, better error messages, change default feed, and more (#8145) @roygbyte
• Dispatcher: Revamp sections and item order (#8200) @yparitcher

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

On Debian 11 and Ubuntu 21.04, you can use the Debian wiki to get a basic setup working, but adapting that to newer version is a bit laborious. Instead a kind soul has already taken care of everything over at pipewire-debian. It’s also a more recent version.

So why use it? In my case, I’ve had PulseAudio crap out when having to deal with more over 20 or so things at once. PipeWire deals with load rather significantly better. I understand latency’s much better too, but that’s never bothered me too much for my fairly regular uses. What’s nice though, is that you can use JACK tools like catia to map stuff around. I don’t think PA had any graphical tools like that, and cryptic command-line commands are too much of a bother for quick one-offs. For the moment I mildly miss PulseAudio’s networking ability.

In short, I’ve switched over my laptops. But I might give it a try on my desktop too.