MiniPad: Take notes on your Iliad.

[hansel]

Thanks Ericshliao!

The problem was indeed in my display update program (xx), which could not open the display. My Iliad didn't suffer this because I removed the '-nolisten tcp' in start.sh (to allow for easy screen dumping)

The new version of MiniPad (0.2.0) solves this. I attached it to the first post of this thread. Please let me know if this works.

For those who installed the previous version: just remove the MiniPad directory from your memory card, unpack the new version and install as before

[hansel]

Originally Posted by ericshliao

Hansel,
your MiniPad reminds me one possibility: it may be expanded to provide IME of Chinese or other languages for iLiad.
For example, a combination of "J"+"I"+"3" will generate a specific Chinese glyph under certain traditional Chinese IME.

Aren't there a LOT of those glyphs? How would such an IME work? Is there a table that translates such combinations to utf8? That would probably be easy to implement...

[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by hansel

Aren't there a LOT of those glyphs? How would such an IME work? Is there a table that translates such combinations to utf8? That would probably be easy to implement...

Roughly speaking, the number of Chinese glyphs may be over 60 thousand, but only 5000 glyphs are commonly used. But due to political and history factors, there are two (only two) main streams: traditional and simplified Chinese glyphs. The previous is used in Taiwan, Hongkong, and maybe Singapore, Makao. The later is used in Mainland China.

People have created various (over 10) IMEs to input Chinese text using the standard keyboard. And there are IMEs for mobile phone. There are even opensource IME on Linux: XCIM and GCIN. In fact, XCIM and GCIN are engines of IME, and each IME can be plugged into XCIM or GCIN by providing its translation table. I think MiniPad can imitate them. The only difference: MiniPad provides application level IME, but GCIN and XCIM provide system-wide IME.

Those translation tables may be not human readable. I will try looking for some csv format table. If you need any further explanation, just ask. I am glad to be of help.

Added:
Take the most common Zhuying IME used in Taiwan for example. The first attached image is a soft keyboard for Zhuying IME. Each key is representing a symbol of Zhuying (on the lower right part of each key). Type "J", then type "I", and then "3" will input a tradition Chinese glyph "我". This is only the case of Zhuying IME.

If using Chanjei IME, to input the same glyph, the combination is "H"+"Q"+"I". The second attached image is the soft keyboard for Changjei IME.

Added 2:
I just found that the translation table used by GCIN are all utf-8 format. It's easy to read. The attached "phone.zip" is the table of Zhuying IME used by GCIN. Each line is a translation of a glyph. The first part of a line is the combination of key(or keys) . The second part is the target glyph. There are two "space" between them. If you have Chinese font installed in your system, you can view the file without any problem.
When you read the file, the lines after "%keyname begin" are the buttons on keyboard and their respective basic symbols used by the IME, and the lines after "%chardef begin" are translation of each glyph.

[ericshliao]

Just tried 0.2.0. Seems working fine.
One minor problem: Clicking "Notes" or "Hide" icon will cause the screen refresh twice (sometimes thrice). Could you delay calling refresh (400 ms should be enough)? I guess maybe you can solve the problem this way.

BTW, is it possible to use Typing refresh always and let users decide when to generate a full refresh by clicking a button?

[Iñigo]

Another fine tool from Hansel!

It works perfectly.

Some comments:
- put the textview inside a scrolledwindow, and set horizontal scrollbar to never and vertical scrollbar to automatic
- do the arrows buttons on the right have my purpose? they don't do anything here...

Btw, the idea of the small window is brilliant!
I could imagine some interesting uses of memory resident programs... a dictionary, my toolbox app, etc

Iñigo

[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by Iñigo

I could imagine some interesting uses of memory resident programs... a dictionary

By my rough evaluation, with Hnasel's pioneer effort, a dictionary application using mobipocket dictionary on ipdf should be feasible. First, we have to create a mobipocket reader with the minimal feature in lua, and we have to modify ipdf to allow clicking on a word to activate the dictionary.

[hansel]

@Iñigo: thanks for the compliments! Scrolling by the arrow buttons is still to be implemented. When I add a scrollbar, every character added to the textview causes a big 'xdamage' area (the full textview), which causes a full display refresh. I have no good workaround for this yet... hence the arrow buttons. I could get control of all dispaly reshresh by integrating it in MiniPad instead of using xx or xedpmgr, but I like it as it is (a small separate program for the refresh and a 'normal' application)

I'll implement the scroll arrows soon, and a way to enter characters with accents...

@Ericshliao: Chinese will have to wait a bit... not sure yet of what the best / easiest IME / approach might be. Any idea about the number of Chinese iliads are out there? It might be a big market for MiniPad ;-)

[ericshliao]

Originally Posted by hansel

@Ericshliao: Chinese will have to wait a bit... not sure yet of what the best / easiest IME / approach might be. Any idea about the number of Chinese iliads are out there? It might be a big market for MiniPad ;-)

I think that MiniPad does not have to stick to any spcific IME. Ideally, MiniPad can accept all IME as long as a user provide a translation table, just like GCIN or SCIM do.

[Iñigo]

Originally Posted by ericshliao

By my rough evaluation, with Hnasel's pioneer effort, a dictionary application using mobipocket dictionary on ipdf should be feasible. First, we have to create a mobipocket reader with the minimal feature in lua, and we have to modify ipdf to allow clicking on a word to activate the dictionary.

I was thinking in another approach:
- dictionary in .txt / .html format, pre-indexed (look below)
- and a dict application that would be a resident program (remember TSR on those ol' DOS days?).

Marking word and clicking an icon (a-la "notes") would show the hidden app with the word. This app could be a simple lua-lgob textview with maybe find feature and scrolling for closer words (listview) offering a one-way read communication channel (socket?, a simple temp file with the word?...).

For performance and memory consumption concerns, we could split the big dictionary file into chunks (aa, ab, ac, ad ... ea, eb, ec, ed,... zz) so the lookup and the memory used could remain low.
The index mentioned above could be a mapping: word => file, bytes-offset

Sounds easy?

Iñigo

[Iñigo]

Originally Posted by hansel

@Iñigo: thanks for the compliments! Scrolling by the arrow buttons is still to be implemented. When I add a scrollbar, every character added to the textview causes a big 'xdamage' area (the full textview), which causes a full display refresh. I have no good workaround for this yet... hence the arrow buttons. I could get control of all dispaly reshresh by integrating it in MiniPad instead of using xx or xedpmgr, but I like it as it is (a small separate program for the refresh and a 'normal' application)

Ok, I understand.
What about a custom vertical indicator (%, a custom non-interactive scrollbar like FBReader...)?

I'll implement the scroll arrows soon, and a way to enter characters with accents...

well, that's the reason I didn't find anything in the sources...

About accents, don't think it would work for non latin alphabets but...
what about a "compose" key that when after pressing it and a letter (f.e. 'a') it would open a small window with different alternatives (à, ä, á ...).

Iñigo

PS: I wouldn't talk about it because I don't want to sell vaporware... but during last weeks I'm thinking on coding a file browser (well, in fact 2 file browsers!)
Work and family don't allow me to spend much work on this, but...

Well, anyway, some questions:
- is it posible to launch a viewer like ipdf from another app and get the same results that if it was launched from contentlister (f.e. create directory and manifest file if this is the first time, etc)? I.e. are these actions handled from inside the viewer or in the contentlister?

- afaik, the only way to specify a page when starting ipdf is by changing manifest file... command line arguments and a interface to interact with a running ipdf instance should be quite interesting...

Excuse me for the lazy questions, but I'm not able to find ipdf sources

[hansel]

If just added support for the most frequently used special characters (for Spanish, French, etc....) via the new MOD key. You can access them by pressing MOD and the key that looks most like character you want: pressing MOD and E will show all available E's on the top row of the keyboard. After pressing one, the original keys are restored.

The available glyphs are:

    
    A = {'á','à','â','ã'},
    C = {'ç',},
    E = {'é','è','ê','ë'},
    O = {'ó','ô','ö','õ','œ'},
    U = {'ú','ù','û','ü',},
    I = {'ì','î','ï',},
    N = {'ñ',},
    S = {'ß',},
    ['!'] = {'¡',},
    ['?'] = {'¿',},

I more specials are needed: just mail them: I'll add it to the next version...

The new version of MiniPad (0.2.1) is attached to the first post of this thread.

[Iñigo]

Originally Posted by hansel

If just added support for the most frequently used special characters (for Spanish, French, etc....) via the new MOD key. You can access them by pressing MOD and the key that looks most like character you want: pressing MOD and E will show all available E's on the top row of the keyboard.

Wouldn't be better to show the special chars on the right, above "quit" button?

[KillerRabbit]

Hansel,

I either must be doing something wrong or else there is something different between our Iliads, because I cannot get your application to work.

I've deleted the original version per your directions ("remove the MiniPad directory from your memory card"), and downloaded 0.2.1. I unpacked the .gz into the .tar and then unpacked the .tar into the MiniPad directory. I copied the MiniPad directory to the SD card, put it back into the Iliad and booted it.

When I look at the SD, I see an entry "MiniPad: Install It now!" I tap it, the green led flashes for a few seconds, the display refreshes, and newLister shows "Run MiniPad" with a smiley-face icon. In a smaller font, I see "14:12:01 Installation successfull"

If I tap on the new icon, the greed led flashes a few seconds, the screen refreshes... and returns to newLister. The previous smiley-faced icon is replaced with one of a pencil / pen.

If I reboot the Iliad, I still have the pencil icon and it behaves as I described immediately above.

I wasn't sure which version of newLister I was using, so I upgraded to the latest one (1.0.5), but MiniPad still doesn't seem to work. I've also uninstalled newLister and still no change....

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Marc

[hansel]

Hi KillerRabbit,

Thanks for trying again.

• As far as I can tell you installed MiniPad the right way
• All the results you see (up until the smile and the pencil) are as expected
• The version of contenlister / newlister does not matter
• There should be no need to reboot

Maybe there is an issue with the way to unpack the tgz or the way to copy it to the SD card?!?! I don't have a SD card that works on the Iliad, so I cannot try that, but I just unpacked the MiniPad tgz on an usb stick, inserted that in the Iliad, and installed and ran without problems.

Could you try the following?

• check if there are error messages in the file MiniPad/_files/logfile.txt (on the card, after trying to run MiniPad)
• can you try to install / run Minipad from an usb stick?

Thanks again, I hope very much that we can figure out what goes wrong!

PS: If anybody else experiences install problems: please report!

[hansel]

Originally Posted by Iñigo

Wouldn't be better to show the special chars on the right, above "quit" button?

I think you are right. I'll try that for the next version...
Thanks.