First useable version of the portable scribble merger released.

[Myself]

Okay, once given the helpful hint, I was able to decode what to do. Here are instructions for future Mac users.

If you want to change the color of the scribbles and you are on a Mac, you need to know two things: 1, where your iRexTools application is, and 2, where your iRex digital reader mounts.

So open up a terminal. In my case, my computer is called "carmina" and I put the iRexTools application binary on my Desktop. That means all the files for the application are placed here:

/Users/carmina/Desktop/iRexTools.app

Yours will not look the same, but you need to be able to find it in a terminal.

Likewise, my iRex digital reader mounts under /Volumes/IREX_DR.

So in a terminal, what I need to do is this:

cd /Volumes/IREX_DR/
/Users/carmina/Desktop/iRexTools.app/Contents/Resources/ism -color DarkGreen NotebookPaper\ 001.pdf

You will replace /Volumes/IREX DR/ with the place where your iRex mounts, /Users/carmina/Desktop/ with the location of your iRexTools application, and NotebookPaper\ 001.pdf with the name of the file you want to merge.

Instead of "DarkGreen" you can use any number of colors; you can find a list of the colors you can use by typing "showRGB" at the prompt.

Thanks for such a great application!

[kgg]

First of all, thanks to all those that created the iRexTools (Mac
application (wrapper) for the Mac scribbles application).

I've just had the RS1000S for two days, evaluating whether to buy it or not.
Unfortunately, I've decided to return it to the shop.
Here's my reasoning, hoping that it'll be useful to others (including
iRex).

- In common with a number of other users, I review many scientific
papers, and want to remove their weight (and volume) from my bag.
An ereader should be sufficiently small and light, but have a large
screen. No problem here. The RS1000S is very comfortable to read
from.
- I didn't use it enough to comment on the battery life.
- The speed of the device is just about acceptable, but only just.
Going to next/previous page is quick (even for 9 MB text-only
documents), anything else is too slow (including graphics-heavy
smaller documents). Using the shortcuts at the bottom of the screen
to zoom in/out & pan helped significantly in cutting down on the use
of (slow) menus. Embedded feature request: being able to map
functions (other than the standard ones) to the buttons. There are
9 buttons, with fewer functions mapped to them, hence there's slack.
e.g. two arrow buttons can be used for scrolling, and the central
button to returning to the previous full-page view (remembering
whether it was with or without margins).
- Accuracy of stylus. Not great, it seems to be offset (even after
calibration), and hence adding to existing annotations, or changing
them, does not work well. Regarding the speed of the writing,
i.e. the delay in writing and it appearing on the screen, this was
not great but acceptable.
- Quality of scribbles/annotations is variable. Let me explain: if
not zoomed in, it's hard to write much on scientific articles (the
margins are too small to contain any proofs :-) because the pen's
line is actually quite wide (even when set to the thinnest pen).
Hence you have to you zoom in before writing. But zooming in/out
and scrolling etc. is too slow.
- Operating system. I want to use the RS1000S on both Mac OS X and
Windows (real and virtualised on Mac).
- Windows. I only tried it with Parallels on Mac OS. Mounting was
hit and miss. The most reliable procedure seems to be: start
parallels, connect device to computer, select device in
parallels's USB menu, click YES on the iRex dialogue. The
(documented) bug that you need to turn on the filename extension
to be able to export scribbles etc. is just pathetic. On the
whole I found the Windows software confusing and not very usable.
Major factor against buying the device.
- Mac: many thanks to those who developed the iRexTools. Works very
well, and is a much simpler and cleaner interface than the Windows
software that is supplied with the reader. Major factor for
buying the device.
- Using extra SD cards. Worked ok, except that the Windows software
was not automatically included on a new card. Didn't bother to fix
this (see above).
- Upgrading. I upgraded the device to 1.7. Worked fine.
- Documentation. I'm not impressed with the iRex website &
documentation. The former is very unstructured, and it is
impossible to know what is current or outdated information, whether
it is official or user information. I spent half a day surfing the
web to find reliable information on the Mac (and ended up here). In
the end a single link to the iRexTool application saved the day, but
finding it was pot luck. This is a real shame, because the app is
great. iRex should probably have a non-supported software forum /
download on their website.
- Userfriendliness. I'm a reasonably savvy computer user (computer
scientist even), and it took me way too much time to figure all this
stuff out. (Installing ocaml using fink to be able to convert
scribbles to pdf? And I even know what ocaml is.. Give me a
break.) The only reason I spent this much time trying out the
reader is because I like the technology. Otherwise I would have
given up after 20 minutes. My computer is a Mac, my phone an
iPhone, for a good reason. Hence major factor against iRex.
- Weirdness.
- Switching off the buttons, and then going into full screen display
mode seems to end up in a locked device: cannot use the buttons,
and there is no stylus input either. Reset seems the only way
out.
- Reviewing a 6 page article with few figures resulted (repeatably)
in a message saying that there was no memory to display the page.
No other documents open, reset didn't solve it. No solution. A
very major factor for not buying it.
- Market. The ereader market is just taking off.
- Hence there are multiple standards for DRM, ebooks, etc. This is
a pain, but will sort itself out. I actually don't care about
this, because all I is to review articles on the reader.
- More importantly, the use cases, i.e. how to use the devices, what
GUI / interaction modes, wired/wireless (USB, WIFI, GSM), browsing
yes/no, etc. to use are obviously still evolving. I'm worried
about being stuck with an early adopter model, where waiting for
one year will give me something more mature (usable).
- Given that iRex is a relatively small company, and that
competition is heating up, I'm worried about being stuck with a
potentially unsupported device soon (cf. Apple's Newton).
- Price: high. Not a killer for me, but it's too high to just buy the
RS1000S for fun, and then not use it. It's only 200 euro less than
a full-blown decent laptop (e.g. iBook, which, I know, doesn't read
so well, cannot be written on etc.).
- Recommendations. I would not recommend the RS1000S to any
non-technical person. For techies, like all you reading this
message, it's fifty-fifty.

Conclusions: I'll return the reader to the shop and will wait for a
year to see how the market has evolved. If iRex is still around (I
hope so, I'm working for a Philips spin-off myself), I'll definately
reconsider them. But in the meantime the rest of the market will have
evolved too, including possibly something like the rumoured Apple
iTablet. Until then, I'll review articles the old-fashioned way,
using a red pen, and very small handwriting.

Kees

[ghostwheel]

Good letter, Kees. You could send it to iRex, or maybe post it on their forum. Though they probably also hang out here.
You should send the 6 page document with the problem to iRex in any case - maybe they can fix whatever is wrong...

[scotsman]

Again, thanks a lot for writing the portable scribble merger. Maybe it would be good to have an i386 binary available for download as well, to make it more accessible to users. I have transported my compiled binary to a fresh debian system and it works like a charm, no dependency problems.

Are you following the recent 2.0 beta update? It would be great if you could update the scribble merger to work with that as well (seems that metadata format changed).

Many thanks

[thomega]

Originally Posted by scotsman

Are you following the recent 2.0 beta update? It would be great if you could update the scribble merger to work with that as well (seems that metadata format changed).

Yes, but I haven't dared to try the beta on my DR1000. I depend on it for lecturing, proof reading etc. and the reports of extremely slow indexing (I have > 5GB on my SD card) have scared me away.

I hope to have some time soon to try with an empty SD card, but the term has just started and I'm very busy. [Maybe iRex could lend be a DR for testing ].

[scotsman]

Originally Posted by thomega

Yes, but I haven't dared to try the beta on my DR1000. I depend on it for lecturing, proof reading etc. and the reports of extremely slow indexing (I have > 5GB on my SD card) have scared me away.

I hope to have some time soon to try with an empty SD card, but the term has just started and I'm very busy. [Maybe iRex could lend be a DR for testing ].

Great, thanks for still maintaining the project. Your ism is incredibly useful!

If you want to play around with the new file format without updating your machine, I attach a file and the corresponding metadata made with the April 8 beta 2.0 on DR1000S. I have scribbled something like "This is a test."

When I played around with the new update (reverted back to 1.71 now because I also use it heavily), it seemed that the metadata on the SD card gets changed such that neither your ism nor the new pdf reader would display the scribbles. Thus it may be that one has to merge all one's files before moving to 2.0 (or I did something wrong, as supposedly old scribbles can still be viewed). If I write a script to automatically do that, I will post it here.

[scotsman]

Hi,

I have played around with RC3 of firmware 2.0 and really like it. The only issue is that the scribble merger cannot yet process the new metadata format. I know which parts are different, but do not understand the irextools code enough to change it. So what I did is to write a small converter to change the database such that ism can read it (be careful, it can be that neither firmware 1.7 nor 2.0 can read it then, so use it only on copies of metadata, see my latest script on https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62682 for an example of how to do it).

Here is the script, it requires you to have SQLite3 installed, which on debian is only a very small standalone package. I hope it helps. Also, it should make clear how the metadata differs, which should make it easy to modify the irextools code accordingly.


db=$1

#before changing anything, check firmware version of the file
#(this is very rough, it would be nice if I could just add one global variable)

tablesinfile=`sqlite3 $db ".tables"`
version1xtable=`echo $tablesinfile |grep version1x`

if [ -n "$version1xtable" ]
then
echo "file" $db "has already been converted to database version of firmware 1.x, skipping"
exit 0
else
echo "file" $db "has not yet been converted to database version for firmware 1.x, converting now"
fi

#if we convert, write an empty table "version1x" to indicate that we did so
sqlite3 $db "CREATE TABLE version1x (converted NULL)"

#add the file_type field to file_metadata (is missing in firmware 2.0)
sqlite3 $db "ALTER TABLE file_metadata ADD COLUMN file_type VARCHAR(250)"

#fill that field with "pdf" (even if this is not always correct, this is the easiest way for now, as I do not know how to use regular expressions like where filename='*.pdf' )
sqlite3 $db "update file_metadata set file_type='pdf'"

#change the content of start_anchor in annotations to fit the 1.x syntax
#this is done by changing the value to "pdf:/page:"+the page number from file_position
sqlite3 $db "update annotations set start_anchor='pdf:/page:'||file_position"

exit 0

[DirtyHairy]

For the record: I have looked into porting the scribblemerger and the utilities to 2.0. However, as I am low on spare time right now and the future of the 2.x firmware for my dr1000 still seems unclear to me, I have decided to put the project on hold until either 2.0 gets released or I find myself with copious free time