Official iPDF Fullscreen candidate v1.0 alpha 1 released

[jharker]

A while ago, I made a 'fullscreen' patch for ipdf. It was pretty popular. Recently, iRex asked the developer community to consider making a fullscreen patch for inclusion into the official distributed iLiad ipdf viewer. I volunteered to work on it, and after figuring out the desired specifications, I set to work.

Today I'm officially releasing the first alpha test version of the fullscreen patch. This will be considered for inclusion into the official iRex-released ipdf. I'd appreciate any testing, comments, suggestions, and especially bug reports!

Here's the installer: iPDF_Fullscreen_1.0alpha1-installer.zip (borrowed from the community ipdf installer, thanks!), and here's a zip containing the binary, patch, and source: fullscreen-1.0a1-svn25-dev.zip. The files can also be downloaded from this thread at the iRex forums, and from my webpage.

The binary is the current iRex ipdf v2.11 (svn 25), with my fullscreen patch applied on top of it. So all of the current official ipdf functionality is retained.

To enter fullscreen mode, use a long press of the up arrow. To exit fullscreen mode, use a short press of the "escape" button. Another short press of "escape" exits the program, as usual. The program will intelligently remember your zoom when you toggle fullscreen mode.

Feedback, comments, questions? Bugs? Thanks!

[DeGodefroi]

allright!
I am gonna test it.

edit:
I tested it with a PDF, it was already zoomed, so the fullscreen ipdf only resulted in a shift to the left.
But when I cleared the zoom and then zoomed again, it works like a charm! This iPDF version will ONLY go off when the next version is released!

Great Job!

[alanine]

This is terrific, I'll definitely give it a try. Thank you very much, and I'm looking forward to its inclusion in the next major system update.

While I'm on the topic, I wonder if it'll useful to add a zoom icon specific for viewing 2 column PDFs, which currently is still too cramped to be viewed in full screen.

The zoom will work like this. Pushing the icon will zoom to the top left quarter of the current view, and then page turn will make it go through bottom left, then top right and bottom right, before contiuing with next page's top left. Pushing the icon again will restore the zoom level before it's pushed. If we want another sequence from left to right then top to bottom, we can make another icon. Basically the first will be |/|, the second will be Z.

Hope this will make ipdf more suitable to view technical papers, as the current zoom and pan function are not convenient enough. Also, I find the max zoom level a bit limiting, is there a way to zoom even more that what's currently allowed? technically feasible?

[DeGodefroi]

Hi Alanine,
yes that would be very nice as well. I think technically it is a combo of zoom and panning. Functions that the iPDF supports.
So..I am curious how long this feature will take before it is implemented. :-)

[jharker]

This post got kinda long, so broke it up into sections...

Column zooming

I believe someone has already developed a patch for ipdf that does column zooming... can't find the thread right now, though... It's actually even more flexible than your proposal: you draw a horizontal zoom line across one column, and then it uses that to infer how many columns on a page, and how wide the columns are.

Community development vs. official inclusion

Bear in mind that most modifications won't ever be included in the official version of iPDF because they are very feature-heavy, and iRex is feature-stingy (for good reason). For example, we have bookmarks, column following, search, etc... At some point, you run out of room for new buttons on the toolbar! And we can only make so many hardware button shortcuts before they're impossible to remember. In this context iRex is trying to include the most broadly useful stuff while preventing the UI from getting too complicated to use.

I've thought about compiling all the community developments into one ipdf viewer, but there are so many different community versions of ipdf at this point, it would be quite an undertaking!

This fullscreen patch was written by request of iRex for possible inclusion into the official version of ipdf. (See this thread in the community development section of the iRex forums.) I don't know when it will be officially released, but if all goes well I expect this patch (or one like it) will be in 2.12, or 2.13 at the latest.

Zoom in iPDF

Currently, ipdf zooms by sending a request to poppler for the WHOLE page to be rendered at a certain resolution. So a fit-to-page zoom in fullscreen mode would ask that the page be drawn at 768x1024 pixels, taking up 768 KB in memory (at 1 byte-per-pixel).

If you double the zoom, you would get a page that's 1536x2048 pixels, taking up about 3 MB in memory. Triple the zoom would take up about 7 MB in memory. Rendering time goes linearly with the number of pixels, so a page at 300% should take 9x longer to render than a page at 100%.

The iLiad also pre-caches pages, usually storing many pages at the same time, up to the limit of available memory.

The result is that zoom is hard-limited, because if it wasn't you could zoom to 1000% and fill all the iLiad's available memory with just one page. And it would take a REALLY long time to render that page.

Arguably this is a poor way to handle rendering. A better way would probably be only ask poppler to render the following, in this order:

1. Just the part of the page that's visible on the screen, then
2. A one screen-width border around the visble region (for panning), then
3. The same areas on the next page (for pre-caching).

Doing it this way would take much less memory and would probably be significantly faster, especially when jumping from place to place within a long document.

However, it would have been substantially more complicated for iRex to write a program to do this. To make the necessary modifications to ipdf would require a major rewrite, and I'm too lazy (and too busy!).

[nekokami]

I really desperately want the column viewing modification, and I don't know of a patch to do that. The other feature I really want is the bookmark/comment feature. If these two could get added into the official iPDF or could be patched without having to hack around at the command line too much, that would be great!

[tribble]

That would be a very useful caching mechanism and it would help us get rid of the rediculously low maximum zoom level.

[jonco]

Which button is the "escape" button?

[smp_iliad]

Very nice work!

I have one suggestion. I've been using one version of full screen patch that has a button support for pen mode. Using this button, I could switch back and forth between panning and pen input mode. To me (and I believe to many of us reading A4 technical papers), the most important functions are 1) panning mode 2) pen input 3) full screen. If this combination can be mapped to buttons, it would be very very useful.

[yokos]

Originally Posted by jonco

Which button is the "escape" button?

= top left button.

[ultima]

Hi, it doesn't install on firmware 2.12 !

[daudi]

Just edit the contents of the file Firmware_Script and change 2.11 to 2.12 then it should install.

[nanounanue]

Hi I edited the Firmware_Script as said in the last post and when I want to install didn't happen anything.

I check the file again, and in the directory appears a new file: wrong_fw.xml with the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<package>
<metadata>
<dc-metadata>
<Title>Error: -- mismatch of iLiad's firmware --</Title>
<Description>Firmware Firmware_Script_xml is needed, your iLiad has got Firmware_iLiad_xml.</Description>
<Date>2007-10-14T01:00:00</Date>
<Format/>
<Identifier/>
<Language/>
<Type/>
</dc-metadata>
<y-metadata>
<startpage></startpage>
<image>pdf.png</image>
<version>000</version>
</y-metadata>
</metadata>
</package>

What is wrong?


Thanks in advance

[harald]

So far I have not installed the full screen version, because I would also like to have column view. I browsed a bit through the forums and I saw there IS a column view iPDF. My question is whether there is an iPDF that has both full screen and column view? Thanks so much. Harald

[bedwere]

Is there a refresh button? Unfortunately my unit has developed ghosting and it would be nice to be able to improve readability.