Author Topic: iBooks vs Stanza displaying an epub on iPod Touch/iPhone (Read 15708 times)

daddydave · « **on:** June 09, 2011, 03:08 PM »

Stanza
iBooks

The ebook is Modern Perl, which is provided by the author in epub format as well as PDF. Notice how Stanza cuts off the long lines, which is a known issue with Stanza. However iBooks is painfully slow on my iPod Touch and is generally considered inferior for good reason. Yet it wraps the whole line and displays it.

I am also giving Calibre, an ebook manager, another shot lately. When I attempted to use it before, getting ebooks from my computer to Stanza was painfully unreliable*; now there are two new options for iOS sync including sending ebooks them via iTunes and that is actually 100 times less painful and actually works. If you do it that way, however, iBooks sees the epubs and Stanza doesn't (on iOS, the app kind of owns the documents it opens, kind of like Palm OS 5 which I thought we were evolving away from.) iBooks is painfully slow, but at least it is not cutting off lines like the ones shown above.

--
* With the caveat that I was a little slow to figure out I needed to reserve an IP address for the iPod Touch and so I may have contributed to the unreliability of the initial method.

wraith808 · « **Reply #1 on:** June 09, 2011, 04:27 PM »

The ebook is Modern Perl, which is provided by the author in epub format as well as PDF. Notice how Stanza cuts off the long lines, which is a known issue with Stanza. However iBooks is painfully slow on my iPod Touch and is generally considered inferior for good reason. Yet it wraps the whole line and displays it.
-daddydave (June 09, 2011, 03:08 PM)

It's not long lines by themselves, AFAIK, but the formatting of long lines. I haven't really had that problem with my technical books for that reason.

zridling · « **Reply #2 on:** June 09, 2011, 06:02 PM »

Calibre is definitely the hot trend on the Linux side this year, given its quick improvement:
http://calibre-ebook.com/

(Works on four platforms)

40hz · « **Reply #3 on:** June 09, 2011, 06:34 PM »

Calibre is definitely the hot trend on the Linux side this year, given its quick improvement:
http://calibre-ebook.com/

(Works on four platforms)
-zridling (June 09, 2011, 06:02 PM)

Wow! And here I've been happily running v6.9 and ignoring all the new version alerts. Talk about missing out on some serious improvements. Udating now.

Deozaan · « **Reply #4 on:** June 09, 2011, 08:08 PM »

This is getting off topic from the main post quite a bit, but that link to Calibre made me decide to try it out and look into getting some more eBooks.

So what's the best eBook format in terms of compatibility/convertability? epub? mobi? kindle? prc?

I have some eBooks in 3-4 different formats because I didn't know which was best and I don't have an eReader device.

40hz · « **Reply #5 on:** June 10, 2011, 01:49 AM »

^I prefer an ePub (or PDF) whenever possible. Virtually anything can read them. And ePub is an open standard, which is important to me.

eleman · « **Reply #6 on:** June 10, 2011, 02:29 AM »

When I attempted to use it before, getting ebooks from my computer to Stanza was painfully unreliable*; now there are two new options for iOS sync including sending ebooks them via iTunes and that is actually 100 times less painful and actually works.
-daddydave (June 09, 2011, 03:08 PM)

Excuse my ignorance for I have yet to own an e-book reader or e-book collection of any sort, but why aren't we just dragging and dropping the e-books from the computer to the device? Am I missing something?

Deozaan · « **Reply #7 on:** June 10, 2011, 02:34 AM »

Excuse my ignorance for I have yet to own an e-book reader or e-book collection of any sort, but why aren't we just dragging and dropping the e-books from the computer to the device? Am I missing something?
-eleman (June 10, 2011, 02:29 AM)

Dragging and dropping files onto an iDevice? Is that even possible?

eleman · « **Reply #8 on:** June 10, 2011, 02:55 AM »

Dragging and dropping files onto an iDevice? Is that even possible?
-Deozaan (June 10, 2011, 02:34 AM)

I am as ignorant about iAnything as I am about e-books, but doesn't Apple always brag about how they invented the GUI? Drag&drop shouldn't be missing in a gui. Or should it?

daddydave · « **Reply #9 on:** June 10, 2011, 04:55 AM »

[...incoherent rambling deleted by author...too early in the morning]

Deozaan · « **Reply #10 on:** June 10, 2011, 05:37 AM »

Dragging and dropping files onto an iDevice? Is that even possible?
-Deozaan (June 10, 2011, 02:34 AM)

I am as ignorant about iAnything as I am about e-books, but doesn't Apple always brag about how they invented the GUI? Drag&drop shouldn't be missing in a gui. Or should it?
-eleman (June 10, 2011, 02:55 AM)

The only GUI I know of that Apple thinks shouldn't be missing is the iTunes GUI.

ewemoa · « **Reply #11 on:** June 14, 2011, 11:01 AM »

The ebook is Modern Perl, which is provided by the author in epub format as well as PDF.
-daddydave (June 09, 2011, 03:08 PM)

Coincidentally happen to be reading it - quite a demystifier

On a tangential note, tried the EPUBReader and Lucifox Firefox extensions here and noticed that they both appear to cut off long lines...at least in their default behaviors.

daddydave · « **Reply #12 on:** June 14, 2011, 11:49 AM »

The creators of ePub explain it all.

daddydave · « **Reply #13 on:** June 14, 2011, 12:18 PM »

PDF

It's not long lines by themselves, AFAIK, but the formatting of long lines.
-wraith808 (June 09, 2011, 04:27 PM)

I've wondered what you meant by this. I think you are saying we are currently at the mercy of how the epub author and the epub software choose to format the lines. Hypothetically, the author can take steps to make sure the lines are interpreted correctly on all readers. I haven't had any luck to find anything like an epub validator to make sure this doesn't happen.

wraith808 · « **Reply #14 on:** June 14, 2011, 02:10 PM »

PDF
It's not long lines by themselves, AFAIK, but the formatting of long lines.
-wraith808 (June 09, 2011, 04:27 PM)

I've wondered what you meant by this. I think you are saying we are currently at the mercy of how the epub author and the epub software choose to format the lines. Hypothetically, the author can take steps to make sure the lines are interpreted correctly on all readers. I haven't had any luck to find anything like an epub validator to make sure this doesn't happen.

-daddydave (June 14, 2011, 12:18 PM)

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but yes, you interpreted my meaning correctly. I'm not sure how many ways you can create an e-pub, but I've seen varying formatting based upon where I obtained the document from, and I have seen code format correctly on my iPhone, iPad, and on both. And issues on one or the other. So yes, I think it's a source translation issue.

daddydave · « **Reply #15 on:** June 18, 2011, 03:57 PM »

I fired up the epub in Sigil, a GPLed epub editor, and added one line of CSS:

Code: CSS [Select]

code {word-wrap: break-word;}

and the offending lines wrap now in Stanza:

ewemoa · « **Reply #16 on:** June 18, 2011, 04:55 PM »

Thanks for sharing your findings

ewemoa · « **Reply #17 on:** June 18, 2011, 09:28 PM »

FWIW, I tried adding the line using Sigil, but the displayed results looked no different in Lucifox as well as in EPUBReader.

Sigil seemed to do the wrapping with or without the CSS line.

daddydave · « **Reply #18 on:** June 19, 2011, 07:40 AM »

FWIW, I tried adding the line using Sigil, but the displayed results looked no different in Lucifox as well as in EPUBReader.

Sigil seemed to do the wrapping with or without the CSS line.
-ewemoa (June 18, 2011, 09:28 PM)

I didn't check to see what the wrapping looked like in Sigil, because it was irrelevant for me. I only wanted it to wrap in Stanza. So I resaved it as a different filename (should have saved it as a different title too to make it easier to find) and transferred to the device via iTunes.

Fortunately for me, the one edit I needed to make I was able to find with Google. This would be rather annoying for multiple edits.

ewemoa · « **Reply #19 on:** June 20, 2011, 08:13 PM »

Thanks for sharing the link