Any News on the Document Reader Update?

[gertqin]

I just bought an android tablet, since I really like to read books with Pleco and wanted a bigger screen for that. So now that I'm planning to use the Document Reader even more, I'd like to know what the status of the next update is? Especially pagination would be really useful for me, as I think it improves the reading experience a lot. I hope it won't be too long because of the android compatibility problems with the PDF/EPUB reader, otherwise I'd really like to have the pagination added separately before.

Btw, Pleco is by far the best app I have, and as I have already bought the professional bundle, I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra for this update.

 

[mikelove]

Still in the works - we've got a couple of large institutional customers also pushing for EPUB which certainly helps the case for it.

We had been hoping to wait for Android 4.4 to become a reasonable minimum requirement for EPUB support (so we could rely on having embeddable Chromium, which makes rendering them a lot easier), but since that's probably still at least a year away we're thinking now that we may go for a more minimal approach initially - basically just extract the text of each EPUB chapter using the same code we use for pulling text out of HTML pages now, with extra code to handle a few essential bits like chapter dividers and (probably) links, and present that in a regular Pleco text view. This would almost certainly come with pagination too.

For PDF, the company that makes the PDF library we license on iOS has been murmuring about an Android version recently so we're kind of inclined to wait and see what they end up making at this point - no point reinventing the wheel when a bunch of people who do nothing but make PDF readers all day are potentially going to license us something better.

 

[gertqin]

Ok, sounds good! Thanks for update and quick reply.

I have also found a small bug in the document reader. Some (rare) characters cause the whole sentence or more to be random unreadable characters, see the image, where the same page of a .txt file is shown in Pleco and another reader. Here it is the characters 吋 and 呎 causing the problem (I also know 吔 has the same problem). The encoding of the file is GB.