The One with the Thoughts of Frans

KOReader 2023.03 “Cherry Blossom”

17:37 · Filed under Software

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


koreader-logo-2023-03

Android users on aarch64 are advised not to use the built-in updater until after installing this release (#10068). On systems supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit the 32-bit version will be installed; on systems only supporting 64-bit the upgrade should normally refuse to install.

For advanced users, there’s a new patch manager to easily enable or disable patches (#9970). See here for more information about how to set it up. Be cautious and don’t play with it if you’re not prepared to have to intervene from outside to fix things.

A big under the hood change is partial rerendering (#10124), which enables seeing the results of changed display settings much more quickly:

With EPUB documents (having multiple fragments), text appearance adjustments can be made quicker by only rendering the current chapter.
After such partial renderings, the book and KOReader are in a degraded state: you can turn pages, but some info and features may be broken or disabled (ie. footer info, ToC, statistics…).
To get back to a sane state, a full rendering will happen in the background, get cached, and the document will be seamlessly reloaded after a brief period of inactivity.
An icon in the top left (that you will soon be ignoring) indicates at what step this process is:
Document is partially rendered. Page count, footer info and many things are innacurate. Reading statistics accounting is disabled. You can turn pages, jump links, notice how the new settings look, change settings again…
A full rendering is happening in the background. You can still turn pages, jump links, change settings…
The full rendering is done, but not yet applied: KOReader is waiting for you to be idle to reload. You can still turn pages, jump links, change settings…
You’ve been idle, KOReader is blocked and reloading the document, which should be quick.
When these icons are gone, you are again in a fully sane and working state.
This feature can be disabled per book with tap, or globally with long-press, on Gear > Document > [x] Enable partial renderings.

Cherry blossom credit: https://openclipart.org/detail/254453/cherry-blossoms

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2023.01 “Winter Ivy”

22:55 · Filed under Software

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


koreader-logo-2023-01-fs8

A slightly belated happy new year everyone! It’s a pretty big release, see the technical changelog underneath for details.

A big thanks to @offset-torque for updating the user guide once again, available here. Full changes here.

Ivy from https://www.openclipart.org/detail/307775/ivy-leaves-frame-5

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.11 “Froggy”

22:11 · Filed under Software

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


koreader-froggy-fs8

I’m filling in last minute for our regular artist. Everything’s well, not to worry. On Android our build system now supports AArch64, but they’re not officially part of the release yet.

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.10 “Muhara”

13:17 · Filed under Software

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


koreader-2022-10

We skipped last month’s release because I was right in the middle of moving, which serendipitously coincided with fairly drastic changes that needed more time for testing, such as a big rewrite of gestures and multitouch (#9463).

Users of the Dropbox plugin will now be able to use the new short-lived tokens (#9496).

imageOne of the more visible additions is the new Chinese keyboard contributed by @weijiuqiao, based on the stroke input method (#9572). It’s not smart and it requires knowledge of stroke order. A tutorial can be found here, part of which I will reproduce below.

The stroke input method groups character strokes into five categories. Then any character is typed by its stroke order.

Key Stroke type
一 Horizontal or rising stroke
丨 Vertical or vertical with hook
丿 Falling left
丶 Dot or falling right
Turning

For example, to input 大, keys 一丿丶 are used.

Note all turning strokes are input with a single key as long as they are written in one go. So 马 is input with 一.

After getting the intended character, a 分隔(Separate) or 空格(Space) key should be used to finish the input. Otherwise, strokes of the next character will be appended to that of the current one thus changing the character.

Besides, the keyboard layout contains a wildcard key * to use in place of any uncertain stroke.

Swipe north on the 分隔(Separate) key for quick deletion of unfinished strokes.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.07 “Ladybug”

15:41 · Filed under Software

koreader-2022-07-fs8

The heat a couple of weeks ago got in the way of preparing the release, but here it is!

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.06 “Hawthorne”

22:15 · Filed under Software

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


koreader-2022 06-fs8

The user guide has been updated and greatly improved. You can download it here. For the full changelog see here.

There’s also a new vocabulary builder plugin (#9132), which sports some impressive UI design.
screenshot_vb

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.05 “Tulip”

10:31 · Filed under Software

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

KO May-01

The old F-Droid package has been properly archived. If you use the F-Droid version, please switch to https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid/.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.03 “Snowdrop”

11:00 · Filed under Software

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

ko February-01

While this logo was originally intended for last month and the first daffodils are already starting to bloom, the snowdrops aren’t gone just yet. Unfortunately neither is the war.

A big thanks to @comphilip, whose non-touch improvements (#8859, #8877, #8892) have now made all of the most important functionality available to non-touch users.

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.02 “Україна”

15:55 · Filed under Software

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

koreader-2022 02

This month there’s been a fairly big change on PocketBook. The rendering is now handled directly with inkview (#8727) This may result in some visual differences, but in principle it should work more dependably.

Terminal emulator

The terminal emulator has been completely rewritten, and it’s now a real vt52 emulator (#8636).

Speaking of the shell on a device, whether directly on the device through a terminal emulator or using SSH, you might want to put run some programs that aren’t easily available. At this point you have three options:

  1. Compile your own. Doesn’t sound very attractive? I agree. But in case you want to, we have specialized toolchains available. The very same which are used to build KOReader.
  2. Our own @NiLuJe has created precombined bundles of tools for Kindle and for Kobo.
  3. Many a Linux distro such as Debian provides precompiled packages for various ARM architectures. You can use these through a chroot. See some basic info here, which depends on sudo apt-get install debootstrap qemu-user-static schroot. The advantage is that once you have this set up, you can just apt install elinks inside the chroot. See the picture of my H2O running Elinks showing the tweakers.net website. If this interests you, here’s my quickly cobbled together start-debian.sh script to serve as inspiration.

#!/bin/sh
mnt=/mnt/onboard/.adds/debian/debian

mount $mnt/../debian.img $mnt

mount -o bind /dev $mnt/dev
mount -t devpts devpts $mnt/dev/pts
mount -t proc proc $mnt/proc
mount -t sysfs sysfs $mnt/sys
mount -t tmpfs tmpfs $mnt/tmp

chroot $mnt /bin/bash

umount $mnt/dev/pts
umount $mnt/dev
umount $mnt/proc
umount $mnt/sys
umount $mnt/tmp

umount $mnt

Noteworthy Changes

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

KOReader 2022.01 “Union of Utrecht”

10:23 · Filed under Software

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

KO january A-01

The Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, as well as the Unions of Atrecht and Utrecht are important markers in the history of the low countries. We should be wary of attaching too much importance to such historical facts, but it’s certainly defensible that the present-day nations of the Netherlands and Belgium sprang from these pro- and anti-Spanish alliances.

The Union of Utrecht is best characterized as a military alliance to defend freedom of religion against a governor who was not prepared to make even a single concession. By signing the Union of Utrecht, the eternal departure from Spanish king Philip had been made official. Formally this didn’t happen until two years later, when Philip decided to declare William of Orange a wanted man. This directly led to the States-General declaring the Act of Abjuration. Not only did the States-General not leave a shadow of a doubt as to their thoughts on the matter, but it made reconciliation impossible. A total victory over the Spanish was the only solution. So it goes.

Book Map and Page Browser

Perhaps the most interesting additions this month are the Book map and Page browser (#8613). The book map shows a map of the content of a book, including the ToC, bookmarks, read pages and non-linear flows. The page browser shows thumbnails of pages. There are quite a few explanatory screenshots in this comment, or of course you can just play with it yourself.

File Browser

The file browser has been expanded with a basic select mode (#8595), making it easier to apply certain actions like deleting or moving to multiple files at once. Additionally, there’s a new display for the number of files and subfolders in folders (#8598).

All the Rest

Logo credit: @bubapet

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

Full changelog — closed milestone issues

Installation instructions: Android • Cervantes • ChromeOS • Kindle • Kobo • PocketBook • ReMarkable • Desktop Linux • MacOS

CommentsTags: ,

« Newer Entries • Older Entries »