Talk:Read

From OLPC
Revision as of 04:34, 27 January 2008 by Robby (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

The screenshot (the sharks page) has a typo in it -- "it's" should be "its".

It looks like the content was originally taken from this page about sharks, although I can't find information there for the other animals mentioned in the screenshots, so I assume that it's just a mock-up and isn't something that ships with the laptops. —Joe 12:28, 21 October 2007 (EDT)

Downloading

The following anonymous question was posted on another page. —Joe 10:50, 20 January 2008 (EST)

Read seems to be missing from "preinstalled" activities. How do I retrieve a U.S. English version?

Feature Requests

please make it read other formats as well...I don't think it's very useful to read plain text and html books in the web browser and pdf in the Read activity...and also, it really needs a page up/page down setting on one of the game buttons...scrolling line by line isn't really comfortable in ebook mode... 62.47.162.246

More formats are on the drawing board, and you can press the 'x' game key to skip to the next 'page' of text.

I hate to mention this format, because I find it gross, but: multi-page TIFF. This is commonly used for scanned books. TIFF is crummy for most things, but actually does a damn fine job for high-resolution black-and-white text when using the Group 4 (T.6) two-dimensional fax encoding. AlbertCahalan 00:59, 29 August 2007 (EDT)

A sequence of JPG's would also be useful as this is a fairly standard format for comics and other, more visual, scanned works.

ability to write on a pdf or type comments and save it

Hello. I would like to suggest a feature that "remembers" the user's last-read document page number. The next time the user opens the document, the page view will "jump" to the last viewed page. This feature exists on the Apple Newton, and it is quite handy.

Read already does this in the joyride build, and will be part of Update.1

Hi, There is a message on the article saying that read can ONLY read PDFs and not rtf/txt/html. Is this still the case? I think the #1 feature would be the ability to open txt (at the very least) so that public e-texts (from Gutenberg and others) will be available. So that's my biggest feature request.

Other feature requests:

  1. A way to select and save portions of text to a clippings file for later review... and ideally I'd be able to grab portions of that clipping file easily when working in Write.
  2. A way to annotate or create a margin note, then later review a list of my margin notes and underlined text...
  3. A really quick and easy way to increase the font size while reading. Maybe even while in ebook mode.
  4. It is unclear to me how I would access files stored on an SD card in Read. Does Read have an "open" function?

--Beagley 12:01, 13 December 2007 (EST)

I only managed to read PDF files with it, on Suguar build 650, using File:Read-32.xo, and couldn't open txt, rtf, etc. I'm not sure if it is supposed to be able to, so I wrote "it can currently open PDF files", as this seemed the most accurate user experience at the moment... Also, the Write activity can open rtf and txt I think. --Tomhannen 12:19, 13 December 2007 (EST)
Regarding point 4 above - I think you would access the SD card from the Journal (it would appear as an icon in the bottom of the frame), and then choose a PDF to read. --Tomhannen 01:26, 19 December 2007 (EST)


Feature Request - the ability to open password protected PDF files


Implementation Discussion

Uses the Evince document viewer to render ebooks.


Document Limitations

Are there file size, PDF version or other known limitations to the PDF read functionality?

Both PDF files I'm using in a college course downloaded ok but did not display properly. The 17x11 textbook chapter (two-up layout) crashed the viewer when I tried to scroll to page two at 200% magnification.

The other (WM 66pages)displayed the cover image and page footers, but said "loading" on the other pages for a half hour.

Chapter 3a, Inside Reporting by Tim Harrower http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/dl/free/0073526142/363043/Chapter3a.pdf

We Media: How audiences are shaping the future of news and information http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf

Give them a try...Robby 23:34, 26 January 2008 (EST)