Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, S Page wrote:

> david at lang.hm wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Note that you could have entered file:///media in Browse and located the HTML 
> files; I believe the links to other files would then have worked OK but you'd 
> have to wander around with the USB flash drive hanging out of your XO.

thanks, I'll have to give that a try. this should also work with a SD 
card.

unfortunantly, the mere fact of plugging in the USB stick makes the 
journal go through the entire thing and index it. this takes a significant 
amount of time and the XO is unusable during this time (I ran into a few 
min where the mouse didn't even respond)

> In an ideal world the book would be packaged as a single collection (.xol) 
> file, so downloading it would unpack it in ~/Library and add it to the 
> content navigation in the OLPC Library home page.  You could try 
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_collection and 
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundle_making_script .

I'll look into these.

> (I put Little-Brother.xol on USB, it showed up in Journal, I chose "Start" 
> and this all happened and Browse displayed the e-book.)
>
> In this ideal world the .xol container would gain traction as an e-book 
> format and Bain, Project Gutenberg, and the other content repositories would 
> offer books as .xol bundles.

I just tried a quick google search and found three different .xol file 
formats (an biometrics data format, a database format, and a map format), 
and I'm still looking for the one that you are using for collections.

if there is a trivial means to convert from .xol to a standard directory 
(tar/zip) then it would have a chance.

if you were to define your bundle as a zip file with specific files in it 
then you could also have your software use heristics to deal with zip 
files without your metadata in it (if by no other way then to show the 
list of files to the user and ask for the nessasary data)

> HTML in Browse integrates cleanly with the library/home page, can use 
> advanced CSS for attractive layout, takes you from a link to a document 
> without the download-Journal-Read steps, avoids PDF's fundamental broken-ness 
> rendering a paper page on a screen, has JavaScript to add interactivity and 
> features like annotations, etc. etc.  It's the future.  But PDF is certainly 
> an important legacy format.

html in browse does have one nasty problem, it shows partial lines of text 
at the top and bottom of the screen

as another smaller problem, you have to figure out where to put the 
oversized mouse pointer to minimize it's annoyance when you are trying to 
read. I initially tried to put it on the right edge of the screen, but I 
discovered that it's very easy to flex the case enough to click the mouse 
butten when in tablet mode, which scrolls you to whereever the mouse 
happens to be sitting on the scrollbar.

David Lang