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Jim Chapman

New Member
@Jim Chapman
Any chance we will get PDF support? That is the only thing keeping me from choosing a reader app.
PDF support has been on my 'to do' list for a while (since 2009 actually). The reason for not doing it yet is that it's complicated. There isn't any good documentation for the details of the PDF format, and under the hood it comes with quite a lot of different variants. Depending how the PDF content is represented, it can sometimes be very hard to figure out how to display it on a screen size (or screen aspect ratio) that's different from the one that was used for creating the document. The only 'official' libraries for parsing PDF are very expensive, and the available free libraries and sample code are not very good - meaning that for some PDF documents they would produce really terrible layout.

I could easily produce a Freda build that would achieve decent layout for 99% of PDF documents ... but it would make a mess of the remaining 1%. And the problem is that every time a user tried to read a document that was in that 1%, they would give Freda a bad "can't read my book" one-star review. Result: Freda's store rating drops through the floor.

Conclusion: it's only worth doing if I can do it perfectly, and I so far haven't figured out a way to do it perfectly.

In the meantime, I recommend using Calibre ebook library manager to convert your PDFs to EPUB; it normally does a decent job of the conversion.
 

Russ

Active Member
Conclusion: it's only worth doing if I can do it perfectly

Jim --

That is really too bad, but I do understand. Too many users expect perfection in an imperfect world. For instance, my MOBI to EPUB converter does a good job on most of my files, but sometimes it creates anomalies in the text. I'm just glad it does a good job on the majority of conversions.

Thanks for your inputs on Freda development. The device synchronization feature will be welcomed by many of us.

Teach it to read .mobi files and I'll treat you to a fine dinner (or something more appropriate). :)

Take care,
Russ
 

Bjurn

New Member
I tried liberty as well. Looking great, but terribly slow. It can take hours to load a book. And for some reason suddenly all last lines of every page are missing??? Will give bazaar a try..
edit: Tried Bazaar, it's very quick and doesn't look too bad. And all my lines are readable :)
 
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