Enhancement request: [Reader] swipe left-to-right to change page

[etm001]

Hi,

This is more of a "nice to have": when reading vertically oriented PDFs in reader, it would be more natural to swipe from left-to-right to change the page (i.e., for books printed with vertically oriented text, pages are turned from left-to-right). The layout and navigation of the PDF thumbnails shown at the bottom of the current page, as well as the thumbnail view of all pages in the document (i.e., the button you can tap at the top of reader) should also be changed accordingly to reflect left-to-right reading.

For now I'm just using the "vertically scroll PDFs" option introduced in 3.2.3, which I find more natural than the default right-to-left navigation when reading vertically oriented text.

Also: when reading vertically oriented PDFs, tap-selecting words that span page breaks to show the pop-up definition doesn't work well. For example, if 順練 is the word, with 順 on the preceding page, a pop-up definition will only be shown for the character 順 when you tap it, instead of for the full word. I don't recall this being an issue with non-vertically oriented text. [Edit 1: per a reply in another thread, it looks like the "vertically scroll PDFs" option is a work in progress, with known issues that will be worked out in future releases.]

Edit 2: it looks like pop-definitions for words that span page breaks doesn't work either with default left-to-right text. I'm sure this is a known issue or else it is due to some weirdness with the PDF that I'm using.

 

[mikelove]

LTR doesn't seem to be supported by our PDF reader library yet, sadly (they note that fact in the documentation) - we'll be happy to add an option for it once they do.

Page break spanning is a bit awkward because there's a long delay to parse + load the next page's text, but we can probably find a way to preload them in the background once the reader is open somewhere near the end of the text without imposing too much stutter.