Use Pleco on Android eReader

[sanglan]

Hey!
I've been using Pleco on my smartphone for a while, but recently bought an eReader (Sony Reader T1) and am very happy that I can use it on that as well.
I would like to use Pleco Reader to read Chinese epub books (or convert them to txt first) and would like it very much if the next/previous page buttons could work instead of scrolling.
Scrolling on eInk devices is slow and annoying. Could you maybe tell me if that is already possible, or if that will be possible in the future?

Thanks,
Sanglan

 

[mikelove]

I would like to use Pleco Reader to read Chinese epub books (or convert them to txt first) and would like it very much if the next/previous page buttons could work instead of scrolling.
Scrolling on eInk devices is slow and annoying. Could you maybe tell me if that is already possible, or if that will be possible in the future?

We do support that with the volume buttons, but to support the Sony Reader's scroll buttons we'd have to figure out its button mappings and add support specifically for them, and to be honest it's not a popular enough device to justify the effort. At one point we considered adding a system for users to customize their own button assignments, but since most current Android devices have hardly any hardware buttons (power + volume is about it now, everything else is onscreen) we can't really justify doing that anymore either.

 

[sanglan]

Thanks for the reply!
I saw in the iPhone manual that the iPhone version has on-screen buttons that do the trick. Would it be possible to include these in the android version? Doesn't have to be the Sony Reader buttons, but just want to get rid of scrolling.

 

[mikelove]

I saw in the iPhone manual that the iPhone version has on-screen buttons that do the trick. Would it be possible to include these in the android version? Doesn't have to be the Sony Reader buttons, but just want to get rid of scrolling.

Possible, I guess - it'd have to be an off-by-default option since unlike the iOS version the Android one doesn't have a toolbar and hence adding those buttons is going to eat up a lot of screen space.

FWIW, this thread mentions a couple of solutions for remapping the reader's page turn buttons to the system volume buttons, which would give you a way to get this in hardware.

 

[mikelove]

Though actually that thread also mentions the hardware mappings that the Sony eReader uses for its page scroll buttons, so maybe it'd be easier if we just added an option to page scroll with those

 

[sanglan]

First of all, thanks for all your help!

Well... I tried the first thing, but it crashed my reader. Let me know if/when on-screen buttons will become available, would be very helpful and definitely worth the sacrificed screen space in my opinion.

 

[kiraven]

Pleco Reader on Sony PRS-T1

Hi Mike,
I am using Pleco Reader on my Sony Reader to read Chinese Books.
I read that you are waiting till a switch of Android's html engines to Chrome is done by Google before you implement any major updates, but would it be possible to introduce a small feature before?
At the moment Pleco Reader does not support the Readers back and forth keys, it is only possible to scroll. Do to the e-ink display, scrolling works rather bad and slow on the eReader and drains the battery.

It would be perfect if it would be possible to flip through the pages using the Reader's keys. It should be a easy change, as Pleco already supports leafing by using the volume buttons, you only had to introduce a second mapping. Further, it would be good if the animation that's used if one scrolls using the volume buttons would be disabled for that case.

(to clarify: the PRS-T1 has no volume buttons, I only tested that behavior on my cellphone.)

If you need any keycodes, here seems to be some information to do a system wide remapping in the other direction, perhaps it is helpfull: http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/PRST1_R ... rn_Buttons .
If you need the content of any system files, you could also ask me.


/edit
Sorry Mike, I overlooked the other thread that's covering exactly the same topic. Perhaps you can move my post there?
To remarks:
if we remap the buttons at system level, we've the problem that they can't be used in the native reader anymore, which I still use for all other languages.
And it seems that my proposal to introduce an setting to deactivate the animation is new, it isn't mentioned in the other thread. Also, that change wouldn't be specific for our the prs-t1, but of use with all eInk devices.

 

[mikelove]

And it seems that my proposal to introduce an setting to deactivate the animation is new, it isn't mentioned in the other thread. Also, that change wouldn't be specific for our the prs-t1, but of use with all eInk devices.

That's true, but from our logs we have exactly 8 users with Sony PRS-T1s and only four of them have actually bought any add-ons, so given that that's nonetheless the most popular e-reader here I'm not sure if there are enough users of other eink devices to justify adding an option. However, we can / will add some code to disable animated scrolling on the PRS-T1 at least (and if anybody has another e-reader they want to speak up for we can try to find / add the fingerprint for that one too).

 

[kiraven]

Hi,
I remapped my dpad keys as volume keys as workarround till build in dpad support in pleco is working.
I am using this app: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showth ... p?t=187054

The problem is that the reader only scrolls some lines down if I press the new volume key once.
Is there a way to configure pleco to flip a whole page each time the volume key is pressed?

//edit1: sorry, it seems as if I am wrong, I'll need some time to figure out what is working and was not

 

[kiraven]

I checked it again. Native dpad support is working now with my device, thank you!
Also, a whole page is flipped each time. But the screen is flickering heavier then usual. It looks like as if the lines are moving back and forth till they found their "right" position. Is that a bug or is the animation still activated for eink-screens?

 

[mikelove]

I checked it again. Native dpad support is working now with my device, thank you!

Great!

Also, a whole page is flipped each time. But the screen is flickering heavier then usual. It looks like as if the lines are moving back and forth till they found their "right" position. Is that a bug or is the animation still activated for eink-screens?

It is, unfortunately we don't really have a good way to detect / disable animations on e-ink screens at the moment since they're not something that's officially supported by Android. (there's no "what type of screen is this" system function we can use)

 

[andria]

Thanks for this discussion. Seems like an eReader is really an ideal device for Pleco, except for OCR. I had been thinking I needed a tablet for reading, but maybe two devices is better -- ereader for texts, plus phone for OCR & animation. Given battery life, an e-ink reader seems ideal for most Pleco purposes. Would any e-ink reader Android 4.0 and above work well? E..g, the new sony t2? (just wish it had a backlight...) Issues aside from animations?

For iphone 5 users looking to review vocab and save power this e-ink case is coming June 2013:
http://www.indiegogo.com/popslate

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for this discussion. Seems like an eReader is really an ideal device for Pleco, except for OCR. I had been thinking I needed a tablet for reading, but maybe two devices is better -- ereader for texts, plus phone for OCR & animation. Given battery life, an e-ink reader seems ideal for most Pleco purposes. Would any e-ink reader Android 4.0 and above work well? E..g, the new sony t2? (just wish it had a backlight...) Issues aside from animations?

I'd actually recommend against buying an e-reader now as a general purpose Android device - it's just too awkward to have the screen update that slowly in most Android apps, and you can find non-ereader tablets with very good battery life these days (the iPad Mini can last something like 10-12 hours even if you're web browsing), so the tradeoffs aren't really worth it.

Also, to be honest this isn't a popular enough way of using Pleco for us to be able to afford to expend more than a cursory effort supporting it, particularly not with the general trend away from dedicated e-readers among consumers (the bottom has really fallen out from under that market in the past year or so), and the same is likely to be true with lots of other potentially-interesting Android reading apps.

 

[andria]

Thanks Mike. If there were an award for nicest customer service, you'd win every year!

Too bad the ereader market is so weak and that they'd require extra work. I haven't enjoyed using tablets and smartphones half as much as I thought I would, and am not really sold on a platform I'd stay with. The iPad is nice for sure, but is not really worth the price for me when the biggest motivator in my next purchase is to get even more of my reading away from the LCD, and I hardly use the tablets we have/had. The T2 supports EPUB (library books!) and reflowing PDFs, which would help with this.

The sorry truth is I don't have much opportunity to use Mandarin, unless I enroll in a class, so I mainly want Pleco to help me do more assisted reading.

Let's see what appealing devices the new year brings. Something with a really nice camera might fill a different want.

 

[bokane]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm wondering whether anyone else has tried using Pleco on an Android-based e-ink device in the last three years. I have a ton of PDFs, and am sorely tempted to go for a large-format e-reader like the Onyx Boox -- a full-sized iPad or iPad Pro (rather than the iPad mini I currently use) just seems like it'd be overkill, since I'd be using the device pretty much exclusively for reading. (Even note-taking would be limited mostly to highlighting.)

Edit: gabor's post here suggests that using the Onyx T68 is probably a vale of tears. Would still love to hear from anyone else who's tried this.

 

[mikelove]

Honestly, new large-format Android tablets and old large-format iPads are almost as cheap as e-readers now. iPad 2 still runs iOS 9.2 (just barely - won't run iOS 10 - and it's poky, but not as slow as an e-reader) and you can pick one of those up used for something in the $100-$200 range, and Amazon's Fire HD 10 costs only $230 new.

Or you could spring for a brand new iPad Air 2 (my personal favorite Apple hardware release of the last 2 years) and justify the cost with split-screen view (which seems like it could offer quite a few benefits for translation work) - Best Buy is selling those for $375 at the moment.

 

[bokane]

Yeah, I think I'll probably fall back on an iPad -- the weird decision not to include 3D Touch in the new iPad Air 2 was one of the things that made me leery, since it seems like it's going to be one of the major ways of interacting with iOS going forward. Split-screen will probably be nice, but these days I'm mostly in grad-student mode rather than translator mode, so it's a bit less of a draw for me: my main use case would just be reading PDFs and highlighting stuff for later review in Skim on the desktop. Cheers.