What are y'all working on lately?
@mauve Getting my ebook reader onto mobile platforms! We went from having no mobile support on the start of May 16 to having both iOS and Android with native SwiftUI/Kotlin apps, respectively ,just calling into a shared Rust core on May 30. They're not perfect yet, but that was really fun.
@TheQuinbox Oh wow! That sounds great. Is your project published somewhere I may read?
Rust core + RPC for UIs is a fun pattern IMO. Are you parsing the books into a tree and rendering using the raw Text nodes instead of rasters?
@mauve Yeah, it's on GitHub: https://github.com/trypsynth/paperback and the official site is https://paperback.dev. I create these things called markers, that form a tree of where headings, links, images, tables, etc are. It also ships with a CLI tool as of late, so you can get all its parsers (legacy/modern word, legacy/modern powerpoint, chm, rtf, epub, pdf, f2b, daisy, etc) from the CLI. Or, just pull in paperback-core and call into the parsers directly.
@TheQuinbox Epic! I don't have a go-to reader on Linux yet. I'll give it a shot some time. 🙇 I find a lot of readers aren't great for keyboard navigation which is essential for me since I use weird input devices and barely have a mouse.
@mauve Paperback is purely keyboard first, I don't ever use a mouse myself. The Linux support is largely untested though, so please feel free to open issues about it.
@TheQuinbox Cool will do! I don't use flatpak much so I'll probs start by just compiling it 😸
Do you navigate the app primarily with the screen reader accessibility tree?
@mauve Yup, entirely. I'm fully blind, so that's the only way I can do so. There are a crap-ton of shortcuts too, h/shift h to go through headings, p/shift p for pages, etc. Enspired by screen reader quick navigation commands on the web.
@TheQuinbox Have you considered getting rid of the concept of pages entirely? I find they tend to be more annoying than helpful, especially with PDFs enforcing their own constraints on what a page is outside of the raw contents I actually care to listen to.
@TheQuinbox That makes sense. I usually navigate by chapters then skim through paragraph by paragraph until I get where I want. It'd be neat if indexes in books referenced line numbers or paragraph numbers for extra quick nav. IIRC Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein had markers like this for easy referencing when I read it.
Ty for the info! 🙇
@mauve I hope Paperback's wide array of navigation units will be enough for you ,not only do we have the quick-nav like I mentioned but also a table of contents treeview, powerful find, go to line/percent/page, and an elements dialog to show you either all headings or all links in a document. If not, once again I welcome GH issues :)
@TheQuinbox epic. Yeah I need to find some time to dig into it 🥳
@mauve I have not, but that's just because they don't get in your way at all. Open up a 500 page pdf in paperback, there are no page markers visible anywhere, you just get a giant flat stream of text. Press p or shift+p, though, and you move between them. Or you can type a page number to jump to by hitting ctrl+p.