dslibris: an ebook reader for Nintendo DS

[wraggster]

News/release from rhaleblian (http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14068)


0.2.0 "books are restored"

http://eris.kicks-ass.net/~rhaleblian/bookshelf/dslibris-0.2.0.zip

you will need to DLDI patch the .nds file for your system. an R4DS binary is included.

new features in 0.2.0:
* last book and page viewed are restored on restart.
* all files in the program's folder ending in .xht or .xhtml are added into the book library.
* support for Latin-1 in XHTML encoded in UTF-8 or iso-8859-1 numeric attribute format. This means some international support (see the included Czech book example).
* page number displayed on right page, positioned according to overall position in book

czech - note that margins has some issues in this case

show the browser with SELECT button. stylus doesn't work , d-pad does.

features carried over from 0.1.0:
* reads XHTML (via expat) and reflows text
* saves each book location in .bkm file
* antialiased, proportional text[/img]

feature plan:
* support books in a subfolder, or anywhere on the media.
* support more than the first 8 books it finds.
* justified text. I had a crappy implementation of this previously, but without a good hyphenation algorithm it can make text even more unreadable.
* better browser UI - looking at COW/TINA.
* support other formats like Plucker. I would like to hear what people are using out there. I would like to support .lit but this looks like a closed format.
* wait cursor while loading.

[betovarg]

Awesome book reader. Do I have to write some commands to convert the html to xhtml with latin "tilde"? lets say: "é" (é). My books in spanish don´t show the tilde. Besides that i can read everything :)

I just found that, well at least in my M3 simply, i must delete the xml file in order to see the list of books, otherwise, I cannot see the list properly.

Thanx!
Betovarg

[Da_ALC]

Can u stick acrobat support in there? :P

[jammet]

Download doesn't work!!! =(

Could you please include support for the Weasel Reader format? It's been widely used on palm, development is still active, and it has fantastic text compression. I have tons of books converted to that format and I would really love to have that on the DS.

[Gilrad]

How about pdb support? I bring it up mostly because I have a bunch of PDB ebooks :P

[betovarg]

Hi, I got to the mailing list for tidy and i got some info. They told me that dslibris is not supporting utf-8 encoding, so i tried latin1 and i got to see some tildes on the text. The thing is, when i try to change pages, i get the red error screen. Does the dslibris support or not the utf 8 encoding? And why does the file creates an error as a latin1 encoding?

Thank you!

[jasonlee183]

Yeah - got to make sure all the downloaded file sit in the root folder of your card for it to work properly - as well as the dldi patch.

Be great if turning to the next page it increments by 1 rather than 2 pages - i.e. so that the page and the right became the page on the left rather than 2 pages repalces by the nest 2 apges.

Also...if I could listen to mp3's while reading my book...hmmmm....

[lordofhyphens]

If you can tell me how to solve the UI difficulties involved in adapting a format that is generally used to display text in a formfactor that far exceeds the amount of screen real-estate the DS has to offer, as well as the obvious problems with not having enough RAM, I will dig the source out of the SVN repository and add support myself.

A lot more goes into "support" for proprietary file format X, Y and Z than you may realize.

As for PDB (which is a generic "database" file format for PalmOS applications), I'll assume you meant PalmDoc. It should be possible to write in support for this, given that rhaleblian (or another developer) has the time, effort, and will to do so. If I had some of my old etexts from when I had a PalmOS device, I'd look into it.