iphone x specific requests

rizen suha

状元
on the iphone x, in the reader, the navigation arrows at the button are too close to the border to be accessed comfortably with the thumb. fx holding and using the telephone w the left hand i would like the left arrow to be indented somewhat. see attached, red arrow marks "suggested indention", possible general rearrangement of arrows not shown.
0D3098F8-DB1C-414A-9CEA-0CE7E61AF99A.jpeg
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yeah, bigger issue on the 6/7/8+ actually. We’re still debating how best to fix that - indenting arrows feels like only a partial solution since the bar is still a little low on the screen for comfort even if indented.
 

rizen suha

状元
2B996927-11B9-4059-AF88-A672F7D74BD1.png

allow me to repeat a request: make space for more text in reader. the bottom elements (slider, page nos, curtain handle) are visually distracting (and i never use them) and, most importantly they take up precious space. (since i read quite a lot and do so with a large font, two extra rows of text here would be a great boon for me, but i gather many would love more space, as always on expensive real estate). you might even consider making it optional to hide the top menu. thanks
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Yeah, we get quite a few requests for that but there are two big problems:

1) We still need to display toolbars at the top/bottom for the reader, and in a paginated text we can't simply scroll the selected range into view if it's covered by a toolbar, so we have to preserve those margins even if we don't put any controls there in order to make sure that you can see the entire page with the reader visible.

2) Because tapping on characters is how you look them up, the usual reader-app trick of showing the interface when you tap anywhere on the screen doesn't work for us, so we don't have a good way to hide/show controls. (we could of course invent our own way, but if it wasn't a standard / obvious one then a lot of people would get confused and annoyed when the controls disappeared on them)

However, if you turn off 'paginate' in the reader settings (gear icon in the top toolbar), that will get rid of the bottom controls and let text go all the way to the bottom of the screen. (this is not currently supported in EPUB, but it will be in 4.0)
 

rizen suha

状元
ok thanks

cant you just let a lookup activated menu bar cover the reader text? or, if it is the first line that is being looking up on/at, just scroll content down while menu bar is visible, thereafter up again?

the bottom stuff really should be optional, i never ever use it and its a huge area, glad to hear that it will be solved (stuff completely gone, slider and curtain handle incl?) in 4o
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
cant you just let a lookup activated menu bar cover the reader text? or, if it is the first line that is being looking up on/at, just scroll content down while menu bar is visible, thereafter up again?

I'd rather not hide the context - even ignoring the fact that it's useful to see what other words are next to the word you were looking up, it's also a way to confirm that you actually tapped on the right word. (the arrow gives you some vague indication but the highlight is better)

All 4.0 is changing in this regard is that the 'paginate' option can now be turned off for EPUBs; in any other supported document type (besides PDFs) you can already get that behavior now, just tap on the gear icon and turn off 'paginate.' You can use a free utility like Calibre to convert EPUBs into text files.

We're not currently planing to get rid of the bottom navigation handle. (but it sticks out less when there's text on top of it)
 

rizen suha

状元
navigation slider should be optional

txt files have alignment issues

bring context into focus when needed, fx via (soft/animated, but swift) scroll/shift down of text
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I suppose we could add an option to hide the slider, sure - we already offer that on Android, as long as we're just hiding it and not adjusting the margins it's not much trouble to code.

As far as allowing paginated text to go to all the way to the bottom and sliding the text into view if needed, I hear you, but I think turning off paginate is likely to be an adequate solution for most users in this situation, so I think we'll stick with the current plan of letting you turn off paginate in more formats in 4.0 and see how that goes; of course we can always reconsider based on user feedback.
 

rizen suha

状元
request: option to lock display orientation. i never use pleco in landscape, other apps yes, so i dont want to use the sys wide lock. on pleco accidental landscape in reader causes rendering waiting times.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
request: option to lock display orientation. i never use pleco in landscape, other apps yes, so i dont want to use the sys wide lock. on pleco accidental landscape in reader causes rendering waiting times.

Orientation locking is a gigantic pain in the butt, but EPUB screen rotation in the reader is pretty much instant in 4.0. (we're now rendering pages with our own code instead of Apple's embedded web browser - we still have to parse the HTML into that format, but we only have to do that once)
 
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