trypsynth/paperback 1.0.0

Paperback 1.0

on GitHub

1.0 is the first release on all five platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, with the iOS and Android apps in the App Store and Google Play.

Added

General

• Linux support, as an AppImage or a tar.gz, with desktop integration so documents open from your file manager.
• Mark the beginning of a selection with Alt+F9, copy everything from there to wherever you have got to with Alt+F10, and go back to the mark with Alt+Shift+F9, for copying a long span of text without shift-arrowing through it. All three are under Tools > Select and copy.
• The = shortcut now announces the page as well as the percentage, e.g. "15%, page 30", and stays as it was for documents with no page numbers.
• The About box now shows Paperback's license and every translator.
• A Ukrainian translation.

New Formats

• Comic book archives (.cbz).
• M4B audiobooks, split into their chapters.
• Manual pages, both man and BSD mdoc, gzipped or not.
• MP3 audiobooks, split into chapters when the file has them.
• reStructuredText documents.
• Windows Write (.wri) files.
• WinHelp (.hlp) files.
• Word 6 and Word 95 documents.

OCR

• Scanned PDF pages can now be recognized with the OCR built into Windows and macOS. Press Enter on a scanned page to recognize it, or use Batch OCR (Ctrl+Shift+O) for a range of pages.

Navigation

• MathML formulas in EPUB and HTML are rendered as AsciiMath using MathCAT. Use M or Shift+M to navigate formulas, then Enter or Space to open the original MathML in Formula View.
• A Find All button in the Find dialog, listing every line with a match so you can jump straight to the one you want.
• Tables, Lists and Pages views in the elements list (F7).
• Go to Line, Go to Page and Go to Percent now take +n and -n to move relative to where you are.
• EPUB, MOBI and CHM books with no headings of their own now get heading navigation from their table of contents.
• KF8 (AZW3) books now support section navigation.
• EPUB pages that are only a picture now show a line for it, so you can land on them instead of skipping straight past.

Audio Books

• Playback speed controls, from half speed to three times as fast. Use Ctrl+Shift+. and Ctrl+Shift+,, or the Tools menu.
• Bookmarks and notes in audio-only books now remember the exact time you set them at.
• Next and previous position (Alt+Left and Alt+Right) now work in audio books.
• Progress through an audio book is now measured by its recording, so Go to Percent and the status bar match how far through it you really are.

Recent Documents

• A Clear Recent Documents item in the Recent Documents submenu.

PDF Documents

• A setting to keep every line of a PDF separate, rather than joining them into paragraphs.
• Images and figures in PDFs are now announced.
• PDFs that carry reading structure but tag none of their pictures now announce those pictures, rather than leaving them out of the book entirely.

Web View

• Any document can now be opened in the web view, not only EPUB, HTML and Markdown.

Readability

• Headings are now drawn at a size that matches their level, and images and tables are set apart from the text around them.

pb

• pb --list-formats lists every format pb can read.
• pb now says which file it could not read, and why.

Fixed

General

• A book reopened at startup now reads straight away, rather than staying silent until it was closed and opened again.
• A document whose file has gone missing can now be removed from All Documents, instead of staying in the list however often you confirm.
• Fixed a crash when closing Paperback.
• Closing Paperback now hides the window straight away, rather than leaving it on screen while it saves.
• Large books with little formatting in them now open in about half the time.
• Messages chosen from a menu, such as "This document has no audio", are no longer cut off by the screen reader before you hear them.
• Opening a document no longer leaves Reopen Last Closed enabled when there is nothing to reopen.
• Paperback no longer keeps retrying documents in your recent list that have gone missing, and caps how many recent documents it stores.
• The old INI settings file is now deleted once it has been moved over to the new format.
• The font and color dialogs' titles, and the Export As menu in Vietnamese, are now translated.
• Updating now brings the relaunched window to the front, instead of leaving it behind every other window in Alt+Tab.
• Word wrap now applies straight away on large documents, rather than reloading the whole thing.

Navigation

• Alt+Left now goes back to where you jumped from, rather than to an older position.
• Bookmark sounds now only play when you move over a bookmark, not when you land on the line it is on.
• Closing the table of contents, the elements list and the Go dialogs now takes you straight to the line you land on, rather than making you sit through the screen reader reading out the window again.
• Go to Line, Go to Page and Go to Percent now refuse numbers outside the document instead of quietly going somewhere else.
• NVDA no longer cuts off the announcement when a document has no pages.
• Pressing OK in the table of contents without moving now goes to the entry that was already selected.
• The table of contents, the elements list and the bookmarks list no longer lag or freeze on books with thousands of entries.
• Up and Down arrow now remember their column per document, instead of carrying it over when you switch tabs.

Audio Books

• Audio playback now uses Control+Space on macOS, since Command+Space belongs to Spotlight.

PDF Documents

• Fixed PDFs exported from Apple Pages reading as plain text, with none of the headings and lists they were written with.
• Fixed PDF paragraphs and headings splitting at every line, and words splitting apart at spaces.
• Fixed numbered PDF headings running together into one heading.
• Fixed PDFs whose structure tree leads to no text opening empty.
• Lines set in a monospaced font, like code, are no longer joined into paragraphs.
• Page headers and footers are no longer read out on every page of untagged PDFs.
• PDFs that tag their page headers and footers as ordinary text no longer repeat the title and the page number between two paragraphs on every page.
• PDFs now show their real title, rather than their file name.

MOBI/AZW3 Books

• Large MOBI books no longer run out of memory, and are no longer cut off after 20 MB.
• MOBI and AZW3 books now open much faster.
• Fixed MOBI books losing their chapter list.
• Fixed garbled text where MOBI books cross from one record to the next.

Web View

• The web view no longer loads the whole of a huge book at once.
• The web view now shows documents whole when the reader shows them whole, rather than only a slice of them.

Other Formats

• FictionBook (.fb2) books written in windows-1251, which is most of them, now open instead of failing to read at all.
• FictionBook books that use a namespace or an HTML entity they never declared now open, rather than being refused as broken.
• Books in legacy encodings now open much faster.
• Fixed some Chinese text files opening as garbled text.
• Password-protected OpenDocument files now ask for their password, rather than being reported as broken.
• Password-protected legacy PowerPoint files now open, and legacy PowerPoint slides no longer lose their text.
• Plain text files saved with an .rtf extension now open as text, rather than failing with an error.
• RTF control words no longer show up as text.

iOS and Android

The iOS and Android apps open every format the desktop does, and include:

• Read aloud, with your choice of voice, rate and pitch, a speech rate control right on the reading bar, and an optional pause between paragraphs.
• Playback of DAISY, M4B and MP3 audio books, which keeps going in the background and from the lock screen.
• Navigation by headings, pages, links, tables, lists and more from the reading bar, plus the table of contents and Find.
• A sleep timer, word count, and document export, plus a speech dictionary on iOS. On iOS, export goes through the share sheet, so a book can go to another app or to Files, in another format or exactly as it is.
• Text size, spacing, and high contrast text options.
• Keyboard shortcuts that match the desktop.