Reader feature issues

S

stacktic

Member
Hi,

I am using the paid reader included in the professional bundle on Pleco 3.2.98 on a Redmi note 9 pro (beta activated on the google play store) and I have the following issues:
- The first is that the app does not seem to be able to open epub bigger than about 45MB and the error message does not tell the reason (I don't have any issues with these files on other apps).
- The second is that it looks like there is no way to access audio files included in epub, by the way, is it normal that the button to use the tts to read the book is only available when a word is selected?
- The third is that the color inversion seems off, the images on your books become grayish and the colors of the images on pdf are completely inverted which makes it unusable for me. Is there any way to disable this without disabling dark mode when reading pdfs?
- The fourth is that navigation on pdfs are not really practicable, the screen does not stay locked on the page, the volume buttons does not work for changing pages even though it is activated in the settings and works fine on epubs.

Did I miss options which could fix these issues?
If I didn't, are these issues fixable? I'm fine doing beta tests if needed, these issues makes the reader nearly unusable for me :(

Have a nice day and I wish you a happy Christmas and end of the year celebration.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry about that. If you contact support we can set up a refund for this purchase for you.

We didn't really intend our current reader feature to be a replacement for a standalone EPUB / PDF reader app - the goal was basically just to let you easily look up Chinese text in most EPUBs and PDFs. So the lack of embedded audio + iffy color inversion + subpar PDF navigation experience are mostly related to that; it's not that we won't ever improve those things, it's just that they're unlikely to be improved until we do a major revamp of the reader, and while we actually are beta-testing a big reader revamp (among other things) on iOS and it'll make its way to Android too soon enough, I can't offer any specific promises about release dates and I don't imagine it will happen within a satisfactory timeframe for your purposes.

The 45MB problem sounds like a bug so we can at least dig into that one - on a phone with 8 GB of RAM a 100MB EPUB certainly shouldn't be presenting any great difficulty.
 
S

stacktic

Member
mikelove said:
Sorry about that. If you contact support we can set up a refund for this purchase for you.
Click to expand...
OK, thank you, I will get in touch.
mikelove said:
We didn't really intend our current reader feature to be a replacement for a standalone EPUB / PDF reader app - the goal was basically just to let you easily look up Chinese text in most EPUBs and PDFs. So the lack of embedded audio + iffy color inversion + subpar PDF navigation experience are mostly related to that; it's not that we won't ever improve those things, it's just that they're unlikely to be improved until we do a major revamp of the reader, and while we actually are beta-testing a big reader revamp (among other things) on iOS and it'll make its way to Android too soon enough, I can't offer any specific promises about release dates and I don't imagine it will happen within a satisfactory timeframe for your purposes.
Click to expand...
It explains why there is no library like book manager in the app.
I expected something a bit like lingq or lwt (https://github.com/HugoFara/lwt) with learning status for each word and a link with the flashcards and automatic OCR (or a button to enable the OCR on the current pdf page). Thank you for being straight forward with the time frame.
Feel free to reach out if you need beta testers or even alpha testers on Android.
Where can I find the changelog of the v4 beta, to know whether looking for an used ipad is worth it?
mikelove said:
The 45MB problem sounds like a bug so we can at least dig into that one - on a phone with 8 GB of RAM a 100MB EPUB certainly shouldn't be presenting any great difficulty.
Click to expand...
Do you know if there is any limit based on the ram size?
Now that I know it does not support audio, removing them from the epub will reduce the size.
I also have 10MB epubs that can't be open, is there any way to have more information in the error message? I may be able to modify the epub if they contains something not supported by the reader or at least try to understand what kind of file does not work.
I also have epubs bigger because the editor wanted to keep the original formatting so it is just one image per page but without OCR on the reader there is no reason to try these files.

Thank you for this quick reply, have a nice day.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
There's no changelog for v4 at the moment but it does have a bookshelf UI, the option to annotate words based on their presence in flashcards or flashcard categories, and the ability to easily flip between text extraction and OCR for PDFs. And in general the EPUB reader is now using our own HTML/CSS parsing stack to which we can easily add whatever missing capabilities we like.

I don't know of any RAM size limits on our end, I'm just assuming it's something in Android's ZIP decoder since it's the most likely culprit - maybe we can't randomly access items in a very large ZIP file (EPUBs are actually just big ZIPs) unless we open it in a different way than we were opening it.
 
S

stacktic

Member
mikelove said:
There's no changelog for v4 at the moment but it does have a bookshelf UI, the option to annotate words based on their presence in flashcards or flashcard categories, and the ability to easily flip between text extraction and OCR for PDFs. And in general the EPUB reader is now using our own HTML/CSS parsing stack to which we can easily add whatever missing capabilities we like.
Click to expand...
Oh nice, it really looks promising and makes me want to buy an ipad just for this but I really don't like this Apple close system.
Regarding css, I am having an issue while trying to optimize my epubs for Pleco, it looks like the style attribute from a span node is used but if I use a class attribute, so as to define the style only once, whether it is on the xhtml file or in a separate css file, it does not have any effect on Pleco.

mikelove said:
I don't know of any RAM size limits on our end, I'm just assuming it's something in Android's ZIP decoder since it's the most likely culprit - maybe we can't randomly access items in a very large ZIP file (EPUBs are actually just big ZIPs) unless we open it in a different way than we were opening it.
Click to expand...
Most of my large epubs are just image based with no real text so not really useful on Pleco, or they have audio tracks using most of the space so removing them is enough to avoid these issues regarding size. Thank you.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stacktic said:
Regarding css, I am having an issue while trying to optimize my epubs for Pleco, it looks like the style attribute from a span node is used but if I use a class attribute, so as to define the style only once, whether it is on the xhtml file or in a separate css file, it does not have any effect on Pleco.
Click to expand...
Yes, we’re using Android’s crusty HTML-to-spanned-string library at the moment so that’s not all that surprising I’m sorry to say. (Our own decoder stack for 4.0 does properly support separate CSS files / styles)
 
S

stacktic

Member
mikelove said:
Yes, we’re using Android’s crusty HTML-to-spanned-string library at the moment so that’s not all that surprising I’m sorry to say. (Our own decoder stack for 4.0 does properly support separate CSS files / styles)
Click to expand...
As using the style attribute in the span works, it's fine.

I just realized there is a button in the menu to switch dark mode on/off so switching when reading a pdf is quiet easy.
Sorry for this but I have another small issue, I get the "Sorry, this EPUB file could not be opened." a lot with no apparent reason, just now while reading a pdf I switch dark mode off and this popup appears. If I go to the dictionary then back to the reader with the pdf still open, I get this message. It is also strange that it looks like this popup is stacked 10 times or maybe this is something else but I have to press OK at least 10 times before it disappears.


Edit:
It looks like each time it reloads the reader it reopens multiple files, not only the current one, I get a lot of these in logcat :
Code: 
W System.err: java.io.FileNotFoundException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: No item at content://media/external_primary/downloads/1000364299
W System.err:     at android.database.DatabaseUtils.readExceptionWithFileNotFoundExceptionFromParcel(DatabaseUtils.java:151)
W System.err:     at android.content.ContentProviderProxy.openTypedAssetFile(ContentProviderNative.java:780)
W System.err:     at android.content.ContentResolver.openTypedAssetFileDescriptor(ContentResolver.java:2029)
W System.err:     at android.content.ContentResolver.openAssetFileDescriptor(ContentResolver.java:1844)
W System.err:     at android.content.ContentResolver.openInputStream(ContentResolver.java:1520)
W System.err:     at com.pleco.chinesesystem.PlecoDocumentReaderFragment.a1(Unknown Source:37)
W System.err:     at com.pleco.chinesesystem.PlecoDocumentReaderFragment.onCreate(Unknown Source:956)
...
or
Code: 
W System.err: javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException: http://apache.org/xml/features/nonvalidating/load-dtd-grammar
W System.err:     at org.apache.harmony.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl.setFeature(DocumentBuilderFactoryImpl.java:101)
W System.err:     at ad.e.u(Unknown Source:125)
W System.err:     at com.pleco.chinesesystem.PlecoDocumentReaderFragment.onCreate(Unknown Source:987)
...
and also
Code: 
W DocumentsProvider: java.io.FileNotFoundException: Missing file for primary:Download/book.epub at /storage/emulated/0/Download/book.epub
 
Last edited:
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
stacktic said:
Sorry for this but I have another small issue, I get the "Sorry, this EPUB file could not be opened." a lot with no apparent reason, just now while reading a pdf I switch dark mode off and this popup appears. If I go to the dictionary then back to the reader with the pdf still open, I get this message. It is also strange that it looks like this popup is stacked 10 times or maybe this is something else but I have to press OK at least 10 times before it disappears.
Click to expand...
That one is news to me - is it maybe specifically related to the dark mode change? (perhaps it's opening the file multiple times because of that and that's bringing out a different RAM issue?)
 
S

stacktic

Member
mikelove said:
That one is news to me - is it maybe specifically related to the dark mode change? (perhaps it's opening the file multiple times because of that and that's bringing out a different RAM issue?)
Click to expand...
Switching dark mode seems to force a refresh of the reader, this is what I do to reproduce it:
- open an epub
- open an other file
- remove the epub from the filesystem
- refresh the reader and the popup appears
 
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