just_jeepin

I'm not sure if this is the right place but I'm looking for a developer that would be interested in working on an OpenSource project. I'm just the idea-man and a graphic designer (so I can work on logo, etc.).

The idea

BookWorm
An open source ebook reader for PocketPC.

Why
I didn't like using proprietary formats and many ebook formats didn't allow the publisher to use bold, italic, or different fonts. I realized that html was actually a great format that supported many options BUT you couldn't bookmark (save your place) in PIE or Minimo. So my quest to find or create the perfect ebook reader for the PocketPC began.

Specs that it must have:
1. Read html.
2. User creatable bookmarks.
3. Edit html (for fixing those typos).
4. User selectable location where the ebooks are stored.

DaLabrador

Bookworm is the title of a game, so another name would probably do better.

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just_jeepin

Oops, I forgot about that. It was the quick obvious name that came to mind. If it could read many other ebook formats then maybe 'Librarian' would be appropriate.

silentknight

Have you tried Haali Reader? .. Its currently my favorite and opens many formats and allows bookmarks. (Oh and its freeware)

http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/

oops I take that back, .. HTML is not supported (Even though they show up in the files list... however XML IS supported)

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jeffa

How about BookWurm? Sounds like you were trying to be edgy and cool... Look at me! I'm replacing an O with a U and it sounds kinda German!

I think there are several good readers out there. Have you tried a few?

Having said that... I've been playing around with the Compact Framework 2.0 and slapped together a little proof-of-concept type app based around the web browser control that ships with the framework.

Here's what I've discovered...

It is dead easy to load up an HTML file and display it. That part took about 10 minutes...

The downside is that you don't get programmatic access to the document object. Why is that bad? It means you can't change font style/size/color/etc. on the fly. You basically point to a file and it loads. The only way to adjust the appearance is to change the HTML itself and reload the file. I had hoped I could access the document object and change the style sheets at runtime.

I've pulled a couple of books from the Gutenberg project in HTML form and loaded them. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a standard for setting up the HTML versions of these things. That means it would be wicked hard to make a program that could reliably set display properties like font size, etc.

Some of the books are set up with style sheets embedded, but there is no rhyme or reason as to how the sheets are set up.

That pretty much kills this app for 90% of the users out there. BUT you also said you thought it should be able to edit the HTML... Hmm. That means you could change the style sheet by hand. Not pretty, but for the 10% (or less) of users willing to do this, it could be a half-way decent reader. No WAY you could make such a thing and sell it, but you said open source... Hmm again...

The edit function would be difficult on large files. I'm trying to work out the best way to approach this. My guess is that you'd just have to pull a section into a pure text editor and edit the raw HTML by hand. Not pretty, but functional (again for the select few only...).

Bookmarking would be simple in HTML using the anchor tag, but I'm still figuring out how to get the bloody control to tell me where it is in the document...

By default you also get the ability to read ASCII files. To change the appearance or do bookmarks, you would have to convert it into HTML. The upside is that I could insert a standard style sheet during the conversion process...

I'll play for a few more days and if it looks promising, I'll post it somewhere you can take a look.

just_jeepin

Thanks for the input. I've tried Haali Reader and it's nice but no html and no easy way to create/convert to fb2 format from a mac. Haali Reader would be close to perfect if it could do html and lit (I actually like Microsoft Reader).

Jeffa,
Thanks for trying things. I guess I'll just keep doing it how I've been... Word doc in PocketWord and using "insert date" to bookmark (I then just search for the year "2006" and then delete the date and start reading). It works fine because I can edit right there but Word is slow sometimes.

jeffa

OK, I slept on it and came up with a possible approach...

If I load the HTML (or ASCII) file into a StringBuilder object and then pass just a chunk at a time to the browser object, I can wrap that "chunk" in an html header and footer including the stylesheet of my choosing. That will also allow me to make plain text files render in HTML with a basic text style applied.

At the bottom of the screen I can have a progress indicator and buttons for previous, next, edit and bookmark list.

It will be more clumsy than I like, but it will work. Performance should be better too, since the browser won't be trying to handle an entire book at once. FYI for testing I used two books primarily: Ulysses by James Joyce and The Outdoor Girls On Pine Island by Laura Lee Hope (it has more complex formatting and some pictures). They were fairly long and made good test subjects. They are very slow when you load the whole book at once into the browser (naturally...).

I, too, would like an open source reader that works fairly well with the Project Gutenberg books. You can get many of them in .lit format, but not all. My only beef with MS Reader is that its library functionality is lacking. Once I get the basic reading functionality down here, I'd like to make a better library function whereby you can organize your books into groups, sort, search, etc. That is an entirely different can of worms, however.

I'm hoping that by the end of the weekend, I'll be able to post a pre-alpha version for you to try out.

jeffa

just_jeepin

Jeffa,

Maybe we could have a naming contest on AximSite and see what other features members would be interested in. Then after we have a name we could start an SourceForge project. Then I could start working on a logo.

just_jeepin

jeffa

That sounds like a lot of fun.

My only capabilities for art are the ones that come under the heading of script-fu in the gimp...

jeffa

Pocketbrain

I use PIE to read non-copyrighted books that I used a VBASIC tool as a command button in Word (attached below) to generate the html for (some manual editing required). I like the idea of a reader based on HTML, it would naturally edit the page source whenever you added a bookmark (both the target page and the header page). I just got PPL and if I get a chance to mess with it, I would be delighted to play with the idea. Not sure how the conversion process from various other formats would go, however, it may be very manual.


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just_jeepin

Here's the url for the naming:
http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=138015

mthrane

Let it support VGA and be able to read pdf files. I hate Acrobat reader.

jeffa

For now I'm just trying to accomodate HTML and ASCII (plain text).

The risk of going to something like PDF is that you wind up overcomplicating the project to the point that it never gets done.

I would personally rather see two separate programs.

For the record, I too hate Acrobat. And clowns.

I'm hoping to create versions for PocketPC2003 and WM5 (including VGA).

To that end I'm creating three separate projects, one for each of the platforms and one for the functional code they will both use.

I'd rather go for something that meets the minimal requirements quickly than something more ambitious. An awful lot of open source projects fail because they were too ambitious with features. I think I can pretty well meet Just_jeepin's initial requirements list in a couple of weeks time max.

What I'm hoping we wind up with is a pretty good viewer for Gutenberg books. Hmm. That gives me another idea for a name...

jeffa

erlingt

Interesting project.

I use my Axim for bookreading - mainly MS Reader - but it would be nice with an open source reader, with support for other formats than the .LIT

I can participate in the project if needed, doing design, programming, project management, test and writing help.

erlingt

As a spin of, of this thread I did a google search, and found this:
http://www.dotreader.com/site/

It looks like what we are talking about.