Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

I'm beginning to get frustrated w/ the N810 and Maemo in particular.

I wanted the N810 to partially become my portable computer... a mini toned down laptop if you will to mainly be able to read ebooks, PDF, and surf the web for information while i'm sitting at the library studying.

PDF's are a hit and miss to me because the built in viewer is fast and snappy but does not have thumbnails or bookmark support while evince does have thumbnails and bookmarks, it takes evince like 5-10 seconds to load each thumbnail and my PDF's are sometimes over 1000 pages. So in order to scan the whole entire thing quickly I have ALOT of waiting time. I give this a 5/10 in terms of usability because it works if all you want to do is read but useless if the PDF is a reference book and speed is an issue.

Surfing the web is exceptionally awesome w/ this device. I very much love the N810 for its near perfect rendering of most sites. It is however sometimes annoying when the site for some reason does not allow for finger scrolling. For example, amazon.com switches to "text select" mode instead of allowing for finger scrolling. Any ideas on how to fix that? I'd say for what the name implies "internet tablet" it works about 8/10 times perfectly.

Now Ebooks is by far the most frustrating thing and if anybody has ANYTHING to say or suggest I'll be MOST grateful. I have alot of CHM files given to me from professors w/ medical textbooks and journals that they suggest I read. Some of these have many chapters in them in addition to photos of diseases. NONE of them work in Fbreader. I figured its not a big deal, i'll just convert them to HTML and use it that way. That was a bust, not only did it not work... i was only able to view one chapter at a time. Again, as a reference book, impossible to use. So in the end unless your ebook is a PDF w/ no bookmarks and fairly short OR text only, your completely out of luck.

Thanks for reading my frustrations.

Please my god please correct me if i'm wrong w/ some of these accusations against the usability of the N810 as a device w/ huge potential. In particular, I NEED IDEAS about how to get my CHM textbook style ebooks w/ chapters + images into a decent reading form. I've tested PDF conversions but run into the same problems as above and HTML is too difficult to navigate w/out a table of contents style menu.

Don't get me wrong... I still love this little thing... Just want efficiency out of it.

Sai

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

Yeah, PDFs are a pain on any platform. ;) Have you maybe tried converting them? Converting will probably be hit and miss, but it may be a usable option for some of them.

My guess is that this has something to do with the invisible part of page elements being factored into the selection logic. A pain, yes, but there are ways around it.

1. Try going either above or below, or to the left or right the element that's giving you trouble.
2. Use the scrollbar.
3. Change the d-pad to page or line-scrolling. See the steps in the comment section of bug #2423

I'd be nice if MicroB would just be consistent about the double-tap-to-select.

Yeah, multi-file HTML books are an admitted stumbling block of FBReader. Have you maybe tried putting together a script of some kind to merge the individual chapters into a single file? Maybe there's a converter about that's convert to some other format (Plucker?).

Perhaps putting them into a folder and setting up an index page to use it from within the web browser locally?

Thankfully, all of my ebooks are in nice single-file formats. :p

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

I'd love it if there was a reader for the n8x0 which supported DRM'd ebooks. I hate DRM on principal, but nearly all books that I would want to read are only available like this :( I'd even settle for paying (a few £/$) for a commercial, closed-source product if it worked

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

Write the owners of said DRM and their software developers, then.

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

Tried that with the ebook seller I used to use on my Windows Mobile PDA (www.ereader.com). They have a bespoke bit of software, which is actually quite nice. Their reply suggested (from their tone) that they were aware of the 770 and n800, but they said they had no intention of supporting the platform. :(

Apparently it works under the garnet vm, but doesn't use the full screen space, which seems a little pointless

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

Blame the DMCA.

Anyway, you can usually find converters for most stuff.

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

There are a couple of convertors that should work for a lot of file types.

1) PDA Convertor - it will convert a plethora of formats to Plucker which can then be read using FBReader.

2) Sunrise (0.42j if your desktop is Linux/Mac or SunriseXP for windows) - is great for parsing large html files with links and images to Plucker format. I've used Sunrise to parse entire online text books. It also works well for parsing RSS feeds with complete articles for offline viewing.

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

for PDFs, there is an ongoing port of evince, you might want to try it here: http://evince.garage.maemo.org/evince-devel.install

it does thumbnails and TOCs and provides easy fullscreen navigation by touching the sides of the screen (this is by your truly)

big files can still be problem tough, mainly due to memory constraints.

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

I've a problem with PDF's that have what were powerpoint slides embedded in them. The slides only show as a frame.
Any suggestions for a fix?

Re: Frustrating PDF, ebook, websurfing thoughts with N810
 

PDF-XChange Viewer would be nice (but win-only).