I love the reader, BUT...!

[daxia]

Hi!
I mainly use the reader and I think it's great for reading novels etc in Chinese, since it's so easy to look up the occasional word/character you don't understand....
...HOWEVER...

there are some things about the reader that are kind of annoying. I dont know if these things count as bugs, but they sure make the experience a lot less pleasant.


1. The fact that the reader sometimes for some reason just goes back to the beginning of the document. This is extremely irritating when you are reading a 400 page book and you haven't made any bookmarks for a while.

2. The fact that there is no "autosave" feature. How about a "save and quit" option on the menu? Let it auto-create a bookmark called time+date. I.e, "13:30, 12/04/01". That way you wouldn't have to worry about forgetting to bookmark your location.

3. The fact that you can only read txt files.

Anyways, I love the app and I hope that you might consider adding/fixing these things as it would enhance the experience greatly!

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

1. The fact that the reader sometimes for some reason just goes back to the beginning of the document. This is extremely irritating when you are reading a 400 page book and you haven't made any bookmarks for a while.

Are you running the latest version (2.3.7)? We fixed a few bugs relating to this in that. If not, what model of device are you using, and what firmware is on it? We've seen some issues with weird app-switching behavior in a few manufacturer-customized skins that could also potentially cause this.

2. The fact that there is no "autosave" feature. How about a "save and quit" option on the menu? Let it auto-create a bookmark called time+date. I.e, "13:30, 12/04/01". That way you wouldn't have to worry about forgetting to bookmark your location.

The reader actually should remember whatever location you were in and return to it when you reopen - is it not doing that for you now?

3. The fact that you can only read txt files.

We actually support web pages too - just "Share" a web page from the browser with Pleco Reader and the text from the page should pop up in our reader. You can't bookmark it, though, unfortunately.

We're a bit hesitant to add EPUB support right now because of the changes coming to Android web browsing (EPUB documents are really just wrapped up HTML files). Google's in the process of replacing the current Android web browser with Chrome, and when they do we expect there to be a totally new app-embedded web browser system to go with it, so we'd rather wait for that and design around it.

PDF support is tricky because Android doesn't have built-in support for decoding PDFs like iOS does - it also presents a potential RAM issue for a lot of phones. We're hoping Google addresses the lack of built-in PDF support in Android 5.0, but if they don't we could adapt or license a library for that; around that time we should also be getting to a point where we can afford to restrict a new feature to devices with 1 GB or more of RAM.

 

[daxia]

1. The fact that the reader sometimes for some reason just goes back to the beginning of the document. This is extremely irritating when you are reading a 400 page book and you haven't made any bookmarks for a while.

Are you running the latest version (2.3.7)? We fixed a few bugs relating to this in that. If not, what model of device are you using, and what firmware is on it? We've seen some issues with weird app-switching behavior in a few manufacturer-customized skins that could also potentially cause this.

2. The fact that there is no "autosave" feature. How about a "save and quit" option on the menu? Let it auto-create a bookmark called time+date. I.e, "13:30, 12/04/01". That way you wouldn't have to worry about forgetting to bookmark your location.

The reader actually should remember whatever location you were in and return to it when you reopen - is it not doing that for you now?

3. The fact that you can only read txt files.

We actually support web pages too - just "Share" a web page from the browser with Pleco Reader and the text from the page should pop up in our reader. You can't bookmark it, though, unfortunately.

We're a bit hesitant to add EPUB support right now because of the changes coming to Android web browsing (EPUB documents are really just wrapped up HTML files). Google's in the process of replacing the current Android web browser with Chrome, and when they do we expect there to be a totally new app-embedded web browser system to go with it, so we'd rather wait for that and design around it.

PDF support is tricky because Android doesn't have built-in support for decoding PDFs like iOS does - it also presents a potential RAM issue for a lot of phones. We're hoping Google addresses the lack of built-in PDF support in Android 5.0, but if they don't we could adapt or license a library for that; around that time we should also be getting to a point where we can afford to restrict a new feature to devices with 1 GB or more of RAM.

Thanks for the fast reply!

1. Yes I am using 2.3.7, and my device is a galaxy s1 GT-I9000, firmware version 2.3.3 gingerbread.xwjvh, and no custom skins as far as I know ^^

2. It does sometimes, but just as often it kind of resets back to the beginning, especially if the screen turns off while you are reading.

3. Sounds good ^^

 

[mikelove]

1. Yes I am using 2.3.7, and my device is a galaxy s1 GT-I9000, firmware version 2.3.3 gingerbread.xwjvh, and no custom skins as far as I know ^^

So it's the official Samsung firmware? Very odd, then... we'll try to load the closest equivalent we can get here and see if we can reproduce this. Can you think of any particular event that seems to cause the reader to reset itself? (turning the device off, say) Are you generally switching into / back from another screen when it happens? What region is your phone localized in? Are you running any other custom app launcher / app switcher of some kind?

2. It does sometimes, but just as often it kind of resets back to the beginning, especially if the screen turns off while you are reading.

Sounds like it's closely related to #1, though again I'm surprised to hear of it happening on a stock firmware Galaxy S.

 

[gato]

We're a bit hesitant to add EPUB support right now because of the changes coming to Android web browsing (EPUB documents are really just wrapped up HTML files). Google's in the process of replacing the current Android web browser with Chrome, and when they do we expect there to be a totally new app-embedded web browser system to go with it, so we'd rather wait for that and design around it.

Does that mean iOS is going to get EPUB support first? It'd be nice to have support table of contents to make it easier to read longer texts.

 

[mikelove]

Does that mean iOS is going to get EPUB support first? It'd be nice to have support table of contents to make it easier to read longer texts.

Very likely, yes - we already have the ability to support tap character lookups in web pages on iOS, so we're much closer to a full EPUB stack on it.