Opie-reader

[rolo]

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.

[TimW]

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.

[rolo]

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