Android alternative to 'alreader' 2 on WM? - Android Software/Hacking General [Developers Only]

Alreader 2 is a nice ebook, doc, txt, etc reader for WM.
It has nice features like font/line sizing/spacing, memorizing last page read for any document, tap up/down to change page, full screen, etc. There's probably more features but those are the ones I use most.
Is there anything like it for Android? (I'm using HTC HD2 and since Android also runs on it... )
edit: Please move if this should be in the App/Games forum. (I just noticed it.)

I think the best is iReader. http://ireader.over-blog.com/pages/About_iReader-1955734.html
I've tried fbreader, aldiko, wordplayer and a few others. With the exception of iSilo and iReader, all were slow when opening an ebook, especially when the ebook is a few MB large. And its worse when they dun support txt, conversion to epub etc with Calibre or the online sites takes decades and often hangs with big files.
But iReader reads txt, pdb, chm, html, etc, and has no problems displaying other languages if you save your txt file in unicode. And when installed on my Samsung Galaxy S, it opens even 10+ MB .txt files faster than Alreader 2 on my HTC Touch HD can open a 6+ MB doc file. Similarly as Alreader, iReader can jump several thousand pages without more than 1-2 sec lag. Changing font size is fast too, apparently no repagination time needed at all.
And best of all it follows the same file opening procedure as Alreader, no crap with updating libraries, bookshelves, book cover displays etc which frankly is much more trouble than is worth.
Conclusion, bookreaders coded by russians and chinese are much more practical for actual heavy duty use. I've used tequilacat on java phones, alreader on WM phones, and now I'm gonna stick to iReader for Android

crandf said:
Conclusion, bookreaders coded by russians and chinese are much more practical for actual heavy duty use. I've used tequilacat on java phones, alreader on WM phones, and now I'm gonna stick to iReader for Android
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Interesting. I'm pretty sure that the readers I ended up using on both Palm and WM were Russian in origin. Although, I can't remember the name of either. Gonna go check-out this one. Been using FBReader. Pretty good. But, the slow library opening is a real pain.

Related

Picsel Technologies products - Slow boot up??

Hi all..
I've been checking lately the awesome products from Picsel Technologies. I'm sure many of you have tried Picsel Browser which can be found here on the board, but I was really impressed mostly from the other products - Picsel ProViewer, and most of all Picsel PDF Viewer.
This latest PDF viewer is simply an astonishing program. It's so cool to navigate between pages, very easy one handed view of large A4 pages, and it loads big sized PDF files very fast.
Of course the products aren't perfect, but the main problem i'm facing on my HTC Trinity is the very slow loading times of all the programs. It takes simply too much time to load these programs.
I read on the net that there is a little program for the Palm devices called Picsel Accelerator which should fix this major drawback. it can be found here:
http://palmpowerups.com/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=2
The question is: Is there any program similar to that one for the WM5 platform?? It would increase the usability of these excellent products a lot.
Or maybe a member here has some tips for improving loading times??
Is nobody using any Picsel techs programs??? Or maybe i'm the only one here having problems with them???
I use picsel browser 3 years on Palm, and now 1 year and counting with my TyTN. It's almost perfec.As you say, the major drawback is the loading time
I use it to read comics. I left it open in background and launch the JPG from Total Commander with doubleclick (I have asociated jpg to picsel browser) so I dont have to leave PBrowser every time I finish the page. Using that technique it loads the images instantaneusly because picsel is already in memory.
Picsel acelerator is only for palm os devices.
Microsoft are working on something called Deepfish which is IE made easy for PDAs. It is somewhat like Picsel browser. It is in private beta at the moment.
Check out the new Opera Mini beta 4;
http://www.operamini.com/beta/
Its got a good implementation of zoom & pan!
Nice FREE, small memory footprint , smooth and fast!!
Try this....
Try this.... move the Piscel.exe from \Windows to \Storage Card .... it do improve the loading time
cheers,
Simon
Like others, I first used PB on my Palm device and truly enjoyed. I also used Picsel Accelerator to speed up the load time. I don't believe PA has been ported to WM quite yet. I'm using Picsel Browser on my Universal but can not get the Browser to connect to the net; but it very good at displaying all most all documents beautifully. When you say its slow to load do you mean the intial loading of the app or loading pages when your in the app?
is there a way to display images as thumbnails with picsel browser instead of file names?

PDF on PDA: a pain in the...?

After trying all sorts of pdf readers, I come close to the conclusion that reading pdf documents on a PDA is not practical at all and even irrealistic.
Due mainly to the fact that one cannot view an entire page with a readable font size without having to scroll sideways.
I end up converting pdf to lit.
Please, give opinion and eventually solutions.
Thanks all, and take care
Come on folks, just a few words about your experience with pdf...
donno i read a book as pdf once
on my pda
only had to scroll down not sideways
depend on the doc in question really i suppose
pref lit though because of bookmarks and cleartype
and not being as much a res hog as acrobat reader which i used at the time
VGA a requirement
I use an older version of Adobe reader on a VGA screen. My eyes are still good enough that I can zoom out, get a full page on the screen, and still read it. I have read an entire book this way. I am sure there are better ways to do it on a PDA. But my goal is to be able to grab a document off of the web and read it as I travel. If there is going to be conversion between formats, it would have to take place on the PDA.
That being said, it is still easier to read a word or text document than a PDF. But if you have the screen resolution and size to work with, PDF's are not impossible.
Thanks folks, that was my impression.
Answers
There are ways to improve PDF experiance. Using reflow when creating PDFs (available as an option when saving PDFs from OpenOffice, for example) greatly improves things.
Anothr good option is Repligo - you can print / convert PDFs to that format. It uses less space, documents open faster and look better (less jagged fonts).
Believe me, PDFs are annoying even in actual, desktop environments. >_>
That said, I'm using Foxit for the PPC. It loads 15MB++ files faster than Adobe, follows the original PDF format faithfully (doesn't try to rearrange like idiotic Clearvue), yet it is a standalone program that requires no installation.
That said, PDF reading is only for devices with a big screen. Definitely bigger than a Mini, let alone an Atom. Otherwise, at a big enough text to be legible, scrolling to the side is necessary - and that tends to lag a bit with bigger PDFs for devices with only 64MB of RAM or less.
I have train skeds and the Tokyo Metro Map plus a crap load more pdf files
that I use on my X01HT and yes you do have to scroll both ways but I mean
have you seen the detail of the Tokyo Metro Map?!?
It works for me. I actually like it.
Plus I get 'really cool' nods from Japanese when they see me looking
through the Tokyo Metro map on my X01HT because most of them
use the low tech pocket paper fold out.
Yes, I am a gaijin otaku and proud of it!!!
imexp then big pictures makes pdf useless on pda's as they can move the text to scale but in there is a picture in the middle they cant really handle scaling the picture down to match the width of the pda screen
I think converting to repligo is the most elegant solution since images are conserved...but it is not free
Otherwise, if pics are not important, converting to text then to lit and using microsoft reader is an acceptable free solution.
To "AquiEsta!": why don't you use the excellent "metro" freeware?
You can use the free xpdf (pocketpdf). It at least has better zoom functions then adobe and it has the option to read pdf as text files with associated functions. You lose pictures but pure textfiles are a breaze to read...
elio said:
I think converting to repligo is the most elegant solution since images are conserved...but it is not free
Otherwise, if pics are not important, converting to text then to lit and using microsoft reader is an acceptable free solution.
To "AquiEsta!": why don't you use the excellent "metro" freeware?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I didn't know such a thing existed. Where would I find that? In English
would be great too!
Thanks
AquiEsta! said:
I didn't know such a thing existed. Where would I find that? In English
would be great too!
Thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
http://nanika.net/Metro/
You will love it
elio said:
http://nanika.net/Metro/
You will love it
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
"more than 350 cities covered now"... I'm already in love with it because
I travel a lot and this hopefully will save me time and advils.
THANK YOU!!!
off I go to set it up...
Adobe Reader for PPC 2 works with my HTC Athena/Advantage VGA screen without legibility problems using its reflow function which wraps the text to your screen - no sideways scrolling needed.
Even if your documents were not prepared specifically for this Active Sync will do the necessary conversion when you transfer the docs from your PC (turn it on in file settings). If you bypass ActiveSync your reflow button gets greyed out.
For documents like maps you can switch to sideways scrolling whenever you want.
My only gripe is that the characters are a little fuzzy, so I'm looking for a fix for this.
UPDATE: fuzzy characters fixed:
Switch resolution to 95 dpi using RealVGA before opening Adobe Reader. Now works as it was meant to. Only downside is the the resolution switch involves a reset.
For reading articles and such offline I use ScrapBook (a Firefox extension) to capture the page/selection and delete ads/sidebars and then 'Save Page as...' and copy the html and corresponding images folder to my SD card. It's a pain but it's the best solution that I could find.
I use Mobipocket Reader to do the conversion and reading, it's free and works well for me www.mobipocket.com
For PDFs Picel Browser, and Foxit Reader for Windows Mobile are pretty good.
I second the picsel reader. http://www.picselpowered.com
Don't let the number of Cons over Pros put you off.
Even with these problems I still use it on a daily basis, and preferred to buy it over using free alternatives like Adobe.
Proof that mobile apps don't have to look like clunky old windows apps.
Pro
Excellent rendering of PDF files
Fine control over zoom, can use a gesture (tap & drag)
Cons
Out of memory errors with just a few other apps running
Remembers last document opened, but not page
No Search
No way of jumping to a page
pdemoore said:
I second the picsel reader. http://www.picselpowered.com
Don't let the number of Cons over Pros put you off.
Even with these problems I still use it on a daily basis, and preferred to buy it over using free alternatives like Adobe.
Proof that mobile apps don't have to look like clunky old windows apps.
Pro
Excellent rendering of PDF files
Fine control over zoom, can use a gesture (tap & drag)
Cons
Out of memory errors with just a few other apps running
Remembers last document opened, but not page
No Search
No way of jumping to a page
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I back this as well, it is bar far, THEE most impressive on a PDA.
It has no rendering lag, making it the fastest PDF reader on WM.
I would only recommend that VGA users view PDFs, QVGA isn't practical.

For heaven's sake: a GOOD PDF Reader!

Dear All
Is there a good PDF reader for Android? I have tried almost all available, and they all seem to have one deficiency or another. Some cannot reflow text, some don't remember their settings, some are fiddly and slow, the clown prince of them all being Adobe Reader.
One thing they ALL are missing is an ability to place bookmarks. See, I'd like to read some PDF books on my Desire but I haven't found one which enables me to place a bookmark.
Any help?
I totally agree. And those reader that do exist do not get any updates - as if they were sufficient.
have you tried Repligo PDF reader.........better than beam reader ( a good 2nd choice)
ThinkFree Office that came preloaded on my Vibrant seems to do it all just fine for me on PDFs.
+1 for RepliGo.
It does not support bookmarks but it remembers when you stopped reading. I've also tried tons of PDF readers and RepliGo seems like the best option.
repligo is great, the fastest at rendering a page out there, and i've tried them all
The real problem isn't the reader software, it's with the PDF format. It was never designed to be "portable". It was designed to represent a PRINTED page, and as such features such as text reflow are not even possible with some PDF's which are essentially image files. Even when it is possible, so much fluff behind the scenes formatting-wise makes reflowed text difficult to render correctly, as images often lose their relevance.
Fact is, PDF is a HORRIBLE format for mobile devices at the very base, it is nothing like HTML or CSS which is designed to be screen/device agnostic to some extent. The best readers can do is try.

Desktop PDF reader for WinRT (SumatraPDF)

Since I can't seem to post this in the correct place (Windows 8 > Windows 8 Development & Hacking on one of the jailbroken RT app threads):
SumatraPDF 2.2.1 - look it up on Wikipedia or Google since I also can't post links...
This is a reasonably capable PDF reader. (Also, from my use of it today, it's certainly more friendly t- o touch than Foxit Reader is on a touch-capable Win8 Pro system.) It also appears to support many other formats - I tried an ePub with it and that also worked well.
I had to make a few minor patches to the source in places (expectations of x86/x64 in a few libraries), and replace the bundled JPEG library to get it to build. I'm assuming printing support will work, but I haven't had reason to test that.
A few visual anomalies seem to exist, but they also seem to be pretty minor. (The toolbar doesn't render quite right, which looks like broken icon references.)
I've attached the binary; contact me and I'll send the link to the source.
Chris
Do you know a good open source PDF editor for Windows? I am not saying you have to compile it to ARM, I can take a look at it myself
SumatraPDF is only a reader as you said.
I need to annotate PDFs and fill out forms. One app at the store does this to some extent, but it's kind of limited.
Thanks for the port; it's added to the list!
@someniceguy: You can actually ue Word 2013 to edit PDFs. If you just need annotation and form filling, though, those can be done with the built-in PDF reader (the Metro-style one). Note that annotation requires a stylus, though, so not available on Surface RT.
First of all, thanks for the info.
GoodDayToDie said:
@someniceguy: You can actually ue Word 2013 to edit PDFs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It asks me to convert the PDF to a Word document first. That's a deal break for me.
GoodDayToDie said:
If you just need annotation and form filling, though, those can be done with the built-in PDF reader (the Metro-style one).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I can use Reader to make basic annotations such as highlighting with a given color and adding notes. Nothing else, it seems. It's a very limited program.
The only semi decent program I found is PDF Touch, but it too has limitations. For example, it gives you a very limited selection of colors for highlighting. And it does not support all types of annotations (or I could not see them), such as adding notes. The worse of it, though, is that it does not show the table of contents of the PDF, and I could not find any way to search inside the PDF.
Use ezPDF (Android) for a brief time and you realize Store Apps for PDF handling are from the stone ages.
Again, thanks for the suggestions, but still looking for that open source advanced program for PDF manipulation.
The progromm is a little bit ugly but works realy fine ! even faster then the mtro app
Yeah, it doesn't take too much to beat the speed of the Reader app. Of course, I was interested in using it with big PDFs - on average, 300 pages, mostly D&D books actually, which left me wanting a program that responded in a timely manner, and would allow me to have multiple files open at the same time, since I'm usually using them as reference material while playing... Reader blew chunks for that on an i5-480m @ 2.66, so there wasn't a chance it would do better on a far wimpier processor...
Has the developer integrated GPU rendering yet? I know he previously complained about the cost/reward ratio. Without it, though, Sumatra really lags all other readers on scanned (old) PDFs or complex ones.
Merconium said:
Has the developer integrated GPU rendering yet? I know he previously complained about the cost/reward ratio. Without it, though, Sumatra really lags all other readers on scanned (old) PDFs or complex ones.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Didn't look like it had any Direct2D dependencies or other such things in it. I also ended up potentially slowing it down a bit by replacing libjpeg-turbo with the original libjpeg, which had it's own gcc dependencies.
On the other hand, at least for the purposes that I wanted a PDF reader for - multiple files open at once, easy access to bookmarks, decently quick rendering - it seems to be good enough. The rendering speed isn't great, but it's better than Reader, which is the other reader I tried before building this one.
The version of SumatraPDF posted here did not work for me. I got the error message "SumatraPDF crashed Sorry, that shouldn't have happened!".
However, this version worked for me. https://github.com/plumeqi/RT_Arm32_Porting/tree/main/SumatraPDF3.3.3/Bin
Now I can read PDF as well as DjVu and ePubs on my Surface RT.
apandada1 said:
The version of SumatraPDF posted here did not work for me. I got the error message "SumatraPDF crashed Sorry, that shouldn't have happened!".
However, this version worked for me. https://github.com/plumeqi/RT_Arm32_Porting/tree/main/SumatraPDF3.3.3/Bin
Now I can read PDF as well as DjVu and ePubs on my Surface RT.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you, bro. I can use it now in 2022.

Office suites, clipboard and S Note

I crosspost that from my post in another thread where google brings me before but but because it is about galaxy 10.1 I posted here. So GT-8020 office experience without external keyboard (but even with keyboard there is no help with big files.
Task
I tried pretty much every office application (hancom I can not get to work due to android version) for very simple task : Select all, copy and then paste to another application (s note) from clipboard and gues what?
None of them can copy large document text. Either they do not have select all comand at all (you must select text by hand) or app crash when text is to long , or copy but not all selected text.
All applications lags very badlly and becomes unusable if you try select by hand too much pages except polaris which is the best in that regard but lacks in clip size and kingsoft. Textmaker is good but have small clip too.
All that said kingsoft manage to grab biggest quantity of selected text but sometimes nothing shows in clipboard. Device is galaxy note 10.1 lte 8020.
Rant bla bla
This renders for me android as unusable platform, gimmick plarform even for simple office task :select all copy paste.
Since now there is a choice of cheaper win8 wacom tablets this is hello goodby and never again from me to samsung and android .
This OS is clearlly only good for phones, not for even low level computing tablets.
I feel cheated because it seems to work all very well for small files but anything bigger than few pages sucks big time.
Note is badly overpriced for such small productivity and this office suites are pure joke , Document which I tried to copy in s note have 170 pages of text and I need even bigger texts.
I am verry dissapointed for that kind of money.
For cheap phone that woul be super but not for expensive tablet.
Somebody asks me what I do with such large files.
Whay all that
Scripted law books for learning, so I can anotate , insert my typed text, recorded lectures, higlight text and insert handwriten notes.
I was thinking that such lightweigt office task would be easy for lynux based android and in return I will have 4g, phone,gps navigation, solid camera with flash for making pdf from books on the fly, hdmi out, and wacom active digitizer in light cheaper than win active digitizer tablet, and with better battery life device.
Seams good from marketing materials and reviews but alas big docs are to heavy for office applications and s note, clipboard is small.
I do not get it four cores cpu , 2 gb of ram, graphic chip and still to weak for office computing with big docs.I think that problem is in office applications not hardware?
In mean time asus vivitab and similar win tablets became cheaper and have a wacom digitizer.
Rant again
I was thinking that for such limited tasks android and hardware would be sufficiant from all informations I gathered and I have only text documents with no graphics.
Now it looks to me that 10 inch tablet is only for ligt notetaking and not for any serious work, even limited as mine, I do not get it who would than need 12 inch pro android tablets?
For few pages documents maybe?
Btw open office port loks nice but nothing shows in clipboard after copy at all so no go for me either.
Looks like vivotab and win8 with office onenote is answer for my needs. If I find another sucker, after selling galaxy it will left me with money for phone, so two devices instead one and problem solved.
Main idea was to have one notebook, one bookreader with annotations etc., and no more sitting all day in front off pc or burning in bed with laptop.
Simple select all with tap or pen , copy and paste from clipboard in another app, did not looking to me like heavy computing now it does but only for android. Marketing shows android and galaxy like great productivity tool.
Limited but good in that particular tasks. No fidlling no viruses take it grab notes annotate books and scripts insert something from web etc. but alas.
With any bigger docs it is simple toy, nothing else.
Conclusion
Problem is evident with all office packages and with all notetaking applications so far best pair from what I tried is Kingsoft Office and S note. But s note opens document so sloooow and than save document so slooow that there is no use from all that trouble

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