Friday 27 January 2012

ReaderZ

I finally got around to checking in ReaderZ to mediaz.

I also tweaked a few things before I did:
  • Added timer and timeout functionality to the GagdetZ event thread. Using a ScheduledExecutionService made this an absolute doddle, and infact the 'event thread' is now just the service.

  • Changed the update mechanisms to try to speed up panning. It now pans using black and white updates and then does a full 'invert' refresh once you stop - after a 700ms timeout of inactivity. It is still a bit slow updating, but that might be because i'm rendering the content on the fly. I can't seem to get the e-ink to go any faster, although I did speed that up a bit over what it was.

  • I took out the HTML backend for now. I'm using a very slightly modified build of CSSBox (to remove the logging dependencies) and just can't be bothered to work that all out. It's a bit slow anyway.

  • For fun I added a picture viewer backend to the DocumentReader.


The README has all the other gory details.

I also had a good look at the text layout mechanism in Java ... boy what a nightmare of code that is. No wonder it's so slow. I tried to work out how it was doing it when it came down to it, but I couldn't fathom it before losing interest. The kobo html reader is about 10x faster at pagination; which just makes it all the more puzzling as to why the text reader is so slow.

Which has me thinking about C again, and using mupdf's stuff to format and render text instead ... well it would work for latin scripts anyway.

No comments: