trypsynth/paperback 1.1.0

Paperback 1.1

on GitHub

1.1 brings a new PDF engine, a rebuilt iOS text mode, OCR on Linux, documents from links, support for decades of older Word, Write, and PowerPoint files, and much more.

Added

General

• A Hungarian translation and user guide.
• Open a document from a link, on every platform. F5 downloads it again.
• F5 reloads the document.
• Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 jump to your first nine open documents.
• Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab switch documents on macOS and Linux.
• The Open dialog and All Documents open every document you pick, each in its own tab.
• Save a picture from the context menu.
• Export bookmarks and notes as text or HTML.
• Settings for the log level, and for whether Find selects its match.
• The window hotkey can be any key, set on the new System-Wide tab of Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Copying says how much it copied, and the text stays on the clipboard after Paperback closes.
• Every menu item has its own access key in every language.
• An unreadable zip opens as a list of the documents inside.

New Formats

• Word for Windows 1 and 2, Word for DOS, Word for Mac 4 and 5, and the Unicode editions of Word 6 and 95.
• PowerPoint 95.
• Zipped FictionBook (.fb2.zip).
• DAISY 3 books that are only a DTBook in a zip, or only audio.

OCR

• OCR on Linux, through Tesseract.
• Recognize Current Page (Ctrl+Shift+R) reads the page you're on again, even if it has text.
• Enter on a picture reads its text.
• Recognized text follows the page's layout, and is remembered, so a scanned document opens with its text.
• Batch OCR can redo pages that have text, reads several pages at once, and stops when you close the document.

Audio Books

• Speeds up to 4x everywhere, remembered across sessions.
• Volume controls.

PDF Documents

• A new PDF engine: faster, uses every CPU core, and needs no pdfium library.
• Headings found in untagged pages, and better titles.
• A setting to keep repeated page headers and footers.

Other Documents

• Word: numbered and bulleted lists, footnotes, endnotes, comments, picture alt text, list navigation, and Word's own pages.
• OpenDocument: footnotes and comments after the text.
• Titles and authors from the document's metadata in Word, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, Markdown, and reStructuredText.
• Comics: title, writer, page types, and bookmarks from ComicInfo.xml.
• FB2: headings, a table of contents, and separate verse lines.
• Pictures in MOBI, KF8, and zipped DAISY books can be saved and read with OCR.
• Dollar-delimited math in Markdown.
• Sphinx directives in reStructuredText.
• Pictures with no description show as [Image].

iOS and Android

• A Language row in Settings.
• Document Info shows your progress, and an audio book's file count and running time.
• Text mode is remembered.
• Keep reading continuously after a Find.
• iOS: text mode rebuilt for VoiceOver. Read All goes through the whole book, the rotors reach all of it, lists and tables are real lists and tables, three-finger flicks turn pages, and the three-finger tap gives the page and percentage.
• iOS: a voice, rate, and pitch per book, from Speech for This Book.
• iOS: password-protected documents.
• iOS: share zipped DAISY books and MP3 audio books to Paperback.
• iOS: the sleep timer stops audio books.
• iOS: Slovak and Ukrainian.
• Android: rate and pitch changes apply to the paragraph being read, and work with the system default engine.
• Android: runs on x86_64 devices.

macOS

• A universal app, native on Intel and Apple silicon.
• pb is included in the app.

pb

• Convert by page, a whole folder, a list of files (--files-from), or a link.

Changed

• The menu bar is reorganized into eight menus.
• The status bar says "Progress" instead of "Reading".
• Menu commands announce what they did, instead of being drowned out as the menu closes.
• Updates close Paperback normally and bring it back to the front.
• Huge text files open with a fraction of the memory, and the 4 GB limit is gone.
• MOBI, Word, and HTML conversion, Find All, and All Documents search are faster.
• The Windows executable is 3 MB smaller.

Fixed

General

• Punctuation shortcuts on keyboard layouts that need Shift for them; Keyboard Shortcuts flags any your layout can't type.
• Focus returns to the document after Win+D.
• Crashes opening bookmarks for a new document, in Find All, and on some damaged MOBI files.
• Regex Find selects the whole match.
• An audio book's status bar no longer flips between audio and text progress.
• The word count includes text read with OCR.
• Scanned pages no longer announce their own image.
• The installer's PATH option.
• Linux updates find their downloads, and an AppImage updates as an AppImage.
• The comment line in Word and OpenDocument files is translated.

Documents

• Windows Write files that opened as binary.
• PDF: text repeated at page breaks in tagged PDFs, second columns read first, lost spaces and line-end hyphens, text in Type 3 fonts, and contents dot leaders.
• RTF: bare CR line endings, dash-bulleted lists, text before the first paragraph, accented and CJK text, text lost after an escaped backslash, and RTF saved as .doc.
• Word and PowerPoint files with damaged containers that Word still opens.
• Word text in tracked changes, fields, and table cells.
• PowerPoint links, slides with no text, and emoji.
• < and & in Word, PowerPoint, and OpenDocument table cells.
• Password-protected OpenDocument files from current LibreOffice.
• CHM files in their code page, and HTML and DAISY files in their declared encoding.
• Zipped DAISY books whose references use the wrong case, and DAISY 2.02 books reading only a section's first phrase.
• Man pages that redirect with .so.
• Markdown front matter read as text.

macOS

• Line-start navigation, keyboard activation, and copy announcements.
• VoiceOver's context menu command opens Paperback's own.
• Menu shortcuts are no longer announced over what they do.

iOS and Android

• iOS: launch no longer killed while restoring large books.
• iOS: reopens on the tab you were reading, closing a tab no longer reads the previous book, and Recent Documents keep their order.
• iOS: audio books are no longer extracted again at every launch.
• iOS: speech dictionary regex rules take \1.
• Android: reading aloud from password-protected documents.
• Android: Previous at the top no longer re-reads the first paragraph, and text mode no longer snaps its scroll.
• Android: less battery use while reading and paused.