AliExpress seller ships from Porselein
I accidentally ended up on the Dutch “translation” of AliExpress. The machine responsible did the best it could, I suppose…
I accidentally ended up on the Dutch “translation” of AliExpress. The machine responsible did the best it could, I suppose…
As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.
I was never a big fan of the Android code names. They didn’t have that Ubuntu flair, and I always struggled to couple them to version numbers. But learning that the next version will simply be called 10? It seems to be illustrative of losing a certain kind of fun. In response, I scream for ice cream!
There’s been a fair bit of work on documentation and internationalization. The GitHub landing page was made more welcoming to make it easier to find the information you need, with developer-oriented information moved into a separate file (#5217), while the translation code was updated to allow for proper pluralization in languages like Polish and Russian (#5257). Furthermore, the release package filename has been simplified to exclude excessive compiler information (#5268). This should make it easier to find the package you need.
2019.08 | 2019.09 |
---|---|
koreader-android-arm-linux-androideabi-v2019.08.apk | koreader-android-arm-v2019.09.apk |
koreader-android-i686-linux-android-v2019.08.apk | koreader-android-x86-v2019.09.apk |
koreader-cervantes-arm-cervantes-linux-gnueabi-v2019.08.zip | koreader-cervantes-v2019.09.zip |
koreader-kobo-arm-kobo-linux-gnueabihf-v2019.08.zip | koreader-kobo-v2019.09.zip |
For Android, we’ve changed our resource bundle from lzma to zip (#5264). Unfortunately, this would make the package size slightly larger and the first time start ever so slightly slower, but we were able to drop the Noto fonts from our package (#5310). On Android these already come with the system. It’s all for a good purpose, because the switch from lzma to zip resolves unexplained first-startup crashes on some systems, improving reliability.
You can now select your keyboard layout independently from your language, because display language and keyboard layout shouldn’t be tied together. (#5318). On Kobo there’s a new crash screen that displays the last few lines of the log (#5328), which looks so neat you’ll want to crash! But hopefully you’ll never see it. 😉
Of course the usual performance improvements and bug fixes are also present. See the full changelog for details, but various CSS parsing optimizations (#5239) can be quite noticeable on affected documents. The gesture manager received some further polish (#5202, #5225, #5294). For the curious who’ve been using MuPDF to read FB2 or EPUB, it’s now finally possible to change the font size without crutches (#5282). Be warned, however, that it’s no less experimental. The document will have to be reloaded to update the total number of pages after font size changes, and bookmarks and highlights will not be in the right location.
Last but not least, accessibility is an often overlooked aspect of design. On a touch screen device without physical buttons the hardware doesn’t exactly contribute to ease of use. Hopefully the new automatic page turner plugin (#5295) will enable more people to enjoy reading. Please let us know about any suggestions you have or resources we can use to do better!
PS Remember, if you don’t use a plugin you can disable it in the plugin manager for a slightly faster startup and a cleaner menu. That’s in Tools (screwdriver & wrench) → Plugin management, which might be on page 2.
Image credit: “Cute Anthropomorphic Ice Cream Cone” from openclipart.
We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:
As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.
Enhanced EPUB rendering can now be enabled on demand (#5117). In the relevant jargon this means correct margin collapsing, honoring negative margins and more properly floating images. In regular people speech, it just means paragraph margins and images will sometimes look slightly better. Other nice improvements include viewing unsupported files in the file manager (#5129) and the ability to restart right from the update dialog (#5150).
A few new edge swipe gestures were added to the gesture manager (#5183), as well as spread/pinch configuration and font increase/decrease actions (#5188). On Android volume keys can now be ignored or used to turn pages (#5158). New contributor @sladflob added configurable sleep messages (#5121), and new contributor @lucarota fixed up some issues in the zsync plugin (#5184, #5185).
Image credit: public domain from Yale Center for British Art. “A Starling” by Isaac Spackman.
We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:
As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.
March mainly brought various under the hood improvements like faster blitting and better line-height handling, but also a more visible dual pages display toggle. On supported platforms, most two-finger swipes are now also configurable in the gesture manager.
Flower illustration credit: Almeidah.
We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:
A while back a typo evaded me. GNU Tar is a utility originally conceived for writing (t)ape (ar)chives, a type of backup, whereas GUN Tar presumably doesn’t exist. Even if it did, it wouldn’t have anything to do with the GNU part of the equation.
Curious about the prevalence of this typo, I quickly found some unrelated but very interesting pictures. A guntar is a a combination of a gun and a guitar — obviously. 😉
Btw, there’s a picture of a guntar here (via)
Here’s a random video of Frank Klepacki playing some songs from Red Alert on his “Vengeance” guitar. I’m not really into guitars, but they can be quite interesting visually.
The typo itself is actually surprisingly rare. I searched for "gun tar" -guns -military -shot -shoot -shooting -foam
but it’s still showing a lot of noise. Only one result was about GNU Tar, namely and embarrassingly, the typo made it into a published book: Utilizing Open Source Tools for Online Teaching and Learning: Applying Linux. Adding an extract
at the end, i.e., "gun tar" -guns -military -shot -shoot -shooting -foam extract
greatly improves on the ratio of typo results.
Permalink CommentsTags: featured, guitar, koreader, language
As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer, I’m proud to announce the latest release.
The Marsdiep is a strait between the North Sea and the Wadden Sea (Wikipedia). When high tide approaches water flows east, and when the tide lowers it flows back west. Inspired by this natural phenomenon, our March release introduces multiswipes, short for multiswipe gestures. A swipe east, directly followed by a swipe west without taking your finger off the screen, will now take you directly to your latest bookmark. All of these are fully configurable in the gesture manager, which can now be found in the new Settings → Taps and gestures menu.
Various Android E Ink ereaders were added to the list of supported devices. Please keep your feedback coming in our dedicated issue!
Android and AppImages can now check for nightly and stable updates from within the program (#4620, #4639).
Because there is so much to cover, here are a few things that stand out to me personally:
These are simply the gestures we thought to be most useful, but they’re hardly the be all and end all. You can add your own gestures using the multiswipe recorder (#4644).
We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous release include:
As one of the maintainers of KOReader, a versatile a document and image viewer for E Ink devices, I’m proud to announce the latest release.
Twenty-five years ago today, the Maastricht Treaty took effect. So let’s take a moment to enjoy the Anthem of Europe before moving on to regular business.
This release introduces support for BQ/Fnac devices, ported by @pazos (#4294). More information about how to turn your device into an open Linux reader can be found here. You will have to replace /etc/rc.local
with the content of koreader-standalone.sh
. We hope this sparse documentation will suffice for the moment, because we really wanted to include all of these devices in this release!
Going forward, the tagged releases on GitHub will be considered stable, unless otherwise indicated by a suffix such as -beta
or -rc
. Hopefully this will remove user confusion about which release to use, particularly since new users will often be on newer devices that require a recent version (#4292).
The many changes since the last stable release are too numerous to mention or do justice. There were many visible changes, but even more under the hood. A few that stand out to me personally include:
We’d like to thank all contributors for their efforts. Some highlights since the previous beta release include:
Full changelog (since previous beta)
Full changelog (since previous stable)