Friday, October 21, 2016

Reading on Android comfortably: books, documents, articles, news, sites, and code Hacker

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Tablets and smartphones has become a complete replacement for the e-books. We use them to read mail, Twitter, news sites, books and documentation. It would seem, here all is clear and there is nothing to explain, but actually there are many nuances and hacking that will make reading text on a mobile device much more pleasant and convenient experience.

Books

let’s Start, of course, with books. For reading books on Android, there are a great many different programs. But for our comfort, they must meet certain requirements: to understand at least the formats FB2 and EPUB (most common), be able to correctly hyphenate words in the Russian language, to be able to sync your reading position via the Internet (started to read on the tablet — continued on the smartphone), to be able to display the book two pages (like a real open book). Well, a set of backgrounds for every taste is also an important symptom.

Such demands satisfy the three best ebook reader in the market:

  • PocketBook. Pleased with support for large number of formats: PDF (Adobe DRM), DOCX, DjVu, RTF, TXT, FB2, EPUB (Adobe DRM) FB2.zip, CHM, HTML (basic), CBZ, CBR, CBT. So with PocketBook, you can not only read books, but also comics and documents. The interface is beautiful and efficiently designed, lot of options, there is support for reformatting a PDF for better reading. Significant disadvantages only three: lack of support for DOC format (some books can only be found in this format, such as various manuals of the Institute), poor choice of backgrounds and not the most intuitive interface.
  • Moon+ Reader. File formats: EPUB, FB2, PDF, Mobi, CHM, CBR, CBZ, UMD, TXT, HTML and OPDS, lack of support for DjVu. Management program is easy and functions the free version is enough for an average user (the pro version will cost 300 rubles).
  • FBReader. File formats: FB2, EPUB, EPUB3, Kindle (azw or mobipocket), RTF, HTML, plain text. To support PDF formats, DjVu, CBR requires the installation of plug-ins. One of the first newsreaders that appeared on Android. Works even with very old smartphones, but some particularly interesting opportunities is no different. Completely free.

All the reader support synchronization through Dropbox read: you can start reading on one device and continue on another. Moreover, FBReader is able to add all open books to Dropbox or Google Drive, so they will be available on all devices.

the Way to sync books is very convenient to use the app Dropsync. Just put all the books in a folder in your Dropbox, and then the mood Dropsync to sync that folder with the device. Recommend to turn off auto-sync — it vyzhiraet the battery and sync manually as needed.

PDF

PDF is a special format of the document, which looks in any image viewer is the same, regardless of screen size, resolution and DPI. And this is also his flaw: to read a PDF on a smartphone is just torture. If you open to full screen the text becomes too small, and the increase appears not only vertical scrolling but also horizontal. One word: PDF for smartphones.

But the output is still there. Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is able to rebuild the document for more comfortable reading on a small screen mobile device. When you activate reading mode (the icon points to the bottom) it comes with a document exactly the same as the e-book reader with the usual book in that it sets easy-to-read text size and activate the correct line wrapping. Naturally, tables, footnotes, TOC, etc. in this case, “go”, but the document could be read.

the same function is in the PocketBook. But the speed and quality of reformatting it plays Adobe Reader. But in Moon+ Reader reflow PDF for a small screen is not very convenient: the sheet is compressed and is scrolled horizontally.

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