Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

Mon Oct 27 00:54:55 EDT 2008

I have no response to many of your points, but I do have responses for a few.

david at lang.hm wrote:
> opening the document in .rtf sometimes works, but about half the time the 
> XO sits and works for about 30 seconds then goes back to the screen you 
> were on before.

This is definitely a bug.  Please file it, and we will try to fix it.

> even when it does work it opens the document in write, not 
> in reader, so you have the cursor moving around (for editing) and it's 
> very hard to page through things to just read the document

Do Page Up and Page Down not work?  If they do not, then that is a bug
too.  Please file it.

> I was completly unable to copy the doument from the USB stick to the local 
> system and have it show up in the journal. when I hit copy things blinked 
> for a few seconds and then nothng.

That's also a bug.  Please file it.

> opening the book in .html just produces a lot of errors becouse the book 
> is spread across lots of files, and the jurnal isolation mechanisms copy 
> the file being opened to a temporary directory, where all the links to the 
> other files don't work.

Definitely true.  This is a fundamental limitation with our datastore.
Several solutions have been proposed, but none have gained momentum.

> even worse, it produces what look like multiple overlapping error 
> messages, but the first one just keep reappearing when you try to clear 
> it, so it's impossible to see what the other errors are.

It sounds like this is also a bug.  Please file it with a screenshot.

> opening the book in .pdf comes the closest to working. I was still unable 
> to copy the document, 

That is still a bug.

> so I had to try and read with the USB stick haning 
> out of the machine. I could zoom so that the text is the width of the 
> screen, but after doing so I was unable to center the text (the arrow 
> buttons move the text in overly large steps.

An interesting usability problem.

> the fit-to-screen option works well if the text goes all the way to the 
> margins, but most documents don't do that. 

You were making this PDF yourself, correct?  You could have set any
margins you like...

> the full-screen mode is useless as the large icon to revert back to normal 
> covers up the text in the upper corner.

That icon is tiny, at least on my copy of Read.  It certainly occupies
less vertical space than the toolbar.  What do you propose instead?

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