Reader: RTF vs PDF issues

[etm001]

Hi,

Attached to this message is a ZIP file containing an RTF file and a PDF file. I've noticed some differences between the two when using reader:

• Text formatting: the text is double spaced and 18pt font. It's correctly displayed in the PDF, but not in the RTF.
• Definitions: try to select 「瑞士人」(very first sentence). In the RTF a pop-up definition is displayed for the term, but in the PDF a definition is only generated for 「瑞」. However, even manually selecting/highlighting the full term 「瑞士人」will not generate a pop-up definition.

The source content was created using TextEdit on a Mac, saved as an RTF file and also exported to PDF. I thought that perhaps there was something fluky with TextEdit, so as a test I opened the TextEdit-generated RTF file in Word (Windows) and the original text formatting was preserved.

Pleco is on an iPad 3, latest iOS.

 

[mikelove]

What about if you open the RTF in Safari (on your iPad) - do you see the same rendering issues there or does it render correctly?

 

[etm001]

I put the file into my Dropbox folder, but Dropbox didn't give me an option to share to Safari. But I was able to open it in Adobe Reader and GoodReader, and both apps displayed the document the same as Pleco reader. I guess this makes sense if all the apps are using iOS platform functionality to load/render the text. As a next step I can try a different app to generate the source RTF to see if the problem lies with TextEdit on my Mac.

One interesting thing that happened: I opened the RTF in Pleco reader then had TTS read the first sentence out loud. Right after the sentence was finished, and before TTS moved on to the next sentence, it read out loud what was clearly document formatting/markup code. It was a only a little bit, and I wasn't able to reproduce this anywhere else in the document.

 

[mikelove]

Good to know it's universal and not Pleco-specific, but I'm sorry it's causing issues for you.

Markup reading thing is a known problem we haven't managed to reliably fix yet.

 

[etm001]

One thing that I've noticed is that in RTF files, the UI is noticeably slower in highlighting words (which actually doesn't always happen when I tap/select), displaying the definition, and tapping to select the next word. Basically it's just really sluggish. On the other hand, in PDF files, everything is snappy. Any reason for this?

 

[mikelove]

Yes - in RTF / HTML / etc files we have to re-render the text that's being highlighted too, while in PDF we just overlay a highlight box and don't redraw anything underneath. In theory we could always use overlays on super-slow devices like the iPad 3, but in pages with complicated formatting / color schemes they don't tend to work so well, which is why we favor re-rendering - the only reason we use overlays in PDFs is because we don't have an alternative.