OESF Portables Forum
Everything Else => General Support and Discussion => Zaurus General Forums => Archived Forums => Software => Topic started by: rolo on September 28, 2005, 12:32:45 pm
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Tim,
Opie-Reader has become an indispensible app for me both for e-books and as an offline web browser in conjunction with Sunrise (formats pages in Plucker).
Please tell me you have plans to add PDFs to the document types Opie-Reader supports. If you have no plans, what are the limitations or what can we (the Z community) do to convince you to take on this mission.
I don't think I'm alone when I say that I'd like one viewer to view them all, well at least most of the formats.
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PDF isn't a good format for e-books as it is based on postscript which is a "Page Description" language. It doesn't really contain the text (or at least not necessarily in an accessible way) so much as a description of how to layout the page with the text on.
This is why PDF documents don't really scale very well to the PDA screen. You are really looking at a page scaled to fit the screen and unless the original page was similar in size to the device screen you just won't get a sensible layout.
Opie-reader, OTOH, is designed to handle a stream of text. There is no stream of text in a PDF document - the text in the PDF file is not even necessarily on the order it appears on screen. There really isn't sufficient overlap in functionality between PDF documents and opie-reader to sensibly add PDF support to opie-reader.
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Tim,
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I didn't realize there was such a difference between PDFs and other document formats. You have a great product in Opie-Reader and I also appreciate the way you have supported the product as well.
Thanks