Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[david at lang.hm]

On Tue, 28 Oct 2008, Jim Gettys wrote:

> http://live.gnome.org/Evince/SupportedDocumentFormats has evince's
> currently supported formats.  I don't know exactly how we have it built.

it's disappointing to see that they miss the obvious/simple text format. 
They are focusing on the more complicated formats.

there is also the problem that since the journal doesn't let you specify 
what program to use to open documents several of these formats will end up 
beng handled by abiword (writer) instead.

David Lang

> The basic point is it is already able to support multiple formats as
> plug-ins and others may be feasible.
>                   - Jim
>
>
> On Tue, 2008-10-28 at 11:52 -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>> Greg,
>>
>> I have never worked on the core Read activity.  From what I have seen of
>> it, I would say that you would have to modify evince so that it could
>> support more formats, notably plain text files and .cbr files (which are
>> archive files containing sequentially named images).  If it did that the
>> need for my two Activities would vanish.  I believe that evince can
>> already support comic books in the .cbr format if you compile in
>> optional support for it.  Of course evince is not an OLPC project, and
>> that will limit what can be done with it.
>>
>> Some of the problems you mention in your entry are actually issues with
>> the Journal (not remembering page numbers and making unnecessary copies
>> of files).  I think others are working on improving the Journal
>> datastore, which should help a lot of Activities.
>>
>> Document sharing is not reliable with Read (or Read Etexts either).
>>
>> Text to Speech in Read Etexts needs additional software to be installed
>> on the XO to work.  Someone was working on this a few months ago.
>>
>> As I said on my page for my Activities, I see them as only stopgaps
>> until the XO has a better Read activity that supports more formats.  I
>> don't feel qualified to work on Read itself.
>>
>> James Simmons
>>
>>> Subject: Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
>>> To: devel at lists.laptop.org
>>> Message-ID: <49071544.6030007 at laptop.org>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>>>
>>> Hi James and David,
>>>
>>> I want to track additions and improvements to the XOs eBook Reader on
>>> our Feature roadmap page.
>>>
>>> I created a requirement called Better eBook Reader at:
>>> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Better_eBook_reader
>>>
>>> Can you update that with any additions or work we need to do? If you can
>>> separate it in to requirement (what we want to do) and specification
>>> (how we will do it) that will help.
>>>
>>> You can also put your name down as an "owner" if you plan to work on it
>>> in the near future.
>>>
>>> Any questions or comments welcome.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Greg S
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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