Longtime user on a windows tablet...and yes I have seen some very odd advertisements over the years.

At first I was not happy with the V5 update.... but now that I have read why you did it I find it commendable.

After first launch I had to set things up again and I noticed two things:

1). There was an issue after tablet reboot (update) that Freda lost the last page you were on. It did not used to do that, I think someone else has also mentioned that.

2). Page turning has changed... and I often see the page swipe as if it turned, only to find it is still on the same page.

Most recent update was within the last week and a new issue has developed. The DLL for MOBI is crashing during the opening of a Mobi format book, leaving FREDA in an uncertain state. This did not occur in the first update to V5 as I was reading the same mobi encoded book then.

Of course I had a MOBI encoded book open at the time of update, which cause confusion and I tried reinstalling and other remedies. I just converted the book to EPUB (elsewhere) and things work fine.

So the error has a very long name of a DLL (with mobi in it)...that is not recognized as a program (or corrupt). Freda itself does not crash, but becomes unresponsive.

Unfortunately, for me my tablet is Win10 32bit which is the source of the issue. Just thought I would let you know.

cheers,
rdl

Hello, Is this Freda update no longer support Pin to start (books) feature? If No, how can I do that?

Hello! Long(ish) time user, first time poster. First of all, thank you for such a wonderful app, I truly appreciate how customizable it is in every aspect and it has been of great use as I've gotten back into reading the past couple of years.

I got the v5 update a couple of days ago and since then I've noticed an issue I didn't have before, and I'm wondering if there's some setting I'm missing or if there's some kind of glitch to work around. In case it's relevant, I use the app on Windows 10, on a single device, and thus never connected the app with OneDrive as all the files I use are local. Most, if not all, of the files I use are .epub.

The issue I've been having since the update is that whenever I try to open a file, it opens from the first page regardless of what my position was the last time I used it. The progress is saved every time I open a book, but on a different "version" of the file that I can access from the bookshelf view, which has hilariously led to there being about 10 different copies of the same book at different progress percentages on the shelf (including multiple 0% ones) as I kept trying to figure out what was going on. 

I tried looking through the settings but didn't find anything that seems related, so I would really appreciate any guidance. How can I make it so that opening a file automatically loads it on the last progress position?

I hope my explanation wasn't too messy. Thank you so much in advanced and thanks once again for such a useful and accessible app!

Hope you all have a lovely week!

Hello,

I am using a Microsoft Surface as a reading device and until the last update, holding my finger anywhere on the screen while reading would let me display every settings that was available while reading (return button, chapters, settings, how far I am in my book, etc.).

Now, I can't. I have tried holding and tapping with two fingers but the only way I found that involved touch was by adding the action specifically in the touch controls.

So, how do I bring back the old behaviour? Or, surely there is a *very* good reason for this to be gone? Otherwise, it would be nice to have this be brought back in the next update.

Hi Jim,

I just got the latest update on my Android and noticed that I have transparent circles in the corners and in the middle along the top and bottom of the reader pane.

I looked but didn't find out how to disable them. Don't even know what to look

I mocked up a screenshot with the effect. Hope you can help me out what I missed during the upgrade.

Thanks, Michael

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The major update to version 5 is now live, and being progressively distributed to Windows and Android users. 

Changes include:

• Application settings have been overhauled and rationalised, introducing a broad class of settings that allow you to tell the app to extract a value from the book file if provided (with a default if not) or else to override the value from the book with some specific value.
  
• Other settings have been renamed or removed, where this makes sense.
  
• Legacy mode rendering is removed (but an option is offered to instruct the renderer to use a simplified layout if you need it).
  
• Popup ribbons, menus and dialogs now have ‘drag handles’ so you can move them around the screen.  The ‘read aloud’ (etc.) ribbon has been redesigned.
  
• Reading page UI has been improved, adding a ‘magnifying glass’ for selected text, and offering additional options for text scrolling and page turning.
  
• There is an ‘accessible menu’ mode, in which the book navigation (etc.) tasks can be done using a single menu, and the ribbons are disabled.  The other app pages use a page-level app bar menu for their various tasks.
  
• Book synchronisation is entirely reworked, allowing you to tell the app to continuously synchronise reading position, library contents, book sources, bookmarks etc. across multiple devices – or to perform such synchronisation on demand if you prefer.
  
• Hyphenation now uses proper hyphenation rules (selected according to the language of the book).
  
• CODE and PRE content is now handled more accurately, so that whitespace doesn’t get accidently skipped or wrongly added.
  

Up until now (August 2023) Freda has been advertising supported.  For me, as the app’s author this has become increasingly troublesome:

• Back in the day, on-line advertising worked like TV and billboard advertising, the business model being ‘I rent out some display space, and in that space the advertiser shows an appealing product description, which may induce the viewer to buy their product’.
  
• But that has morphed, over the years, into something much more objectionable – these days it isn’t really ‘advertising’ at all, as I used to understand the word; rather, the app is becoming a conduit for the harvesting and correlating of personal data, for purposes that we mere netizens cannot understand but would probably disapprove of if we did understand them.
  
• Assorted initiatives (GDPR for instance) have tried to restrict this data harvesting (or at least make sure it happens only with the subject’s consent) but mainly what they’ve achieved is to make the process more cumbersome, without really making it any less insidious.
  

• You can’t create more than ten bookmarks or highlights in one day
  
• The read-aloud function will stop at the end of each chapter
  
• Automatic sync of book position and other details from one device to another will not be available.
  

1. If you’re OK to share your personal details with an app store operator (Microsoft/Google/Apple): download Freda from the app store, and buy the  premium features’ add on if you wish.
   
2. If you don’t want to share personal data with an app store operator: download the Freda installer from Turnipsoft’s website.
   
3. If you’re willing to share personal data (your OneDrive user name / email) with Turnipsoft, then you can acquire a Freda ‘premium features’ licence, and share it between your devices, by paying me for it (either using PayPal, or via an app store).
   
4. If you don’t want to share personal data at all, you can still use Freda, but you won’t be able to use the premium features.
   

Hi,

Thanks for Freda. It is wonderful and i use it a lot. I like to highlight sentences and revisit them later. Is there a way to cycle through highlights? As in, go to next or previous highlight.

If not, could you please considering supporting it?

Thank You
fredaz

• Minor bug fixes and updates to the versions of some third party libraries
  
• Changes to support the imminent update to Freda version 5
  

I've been using Freda for quite a while and it is a wonderful ebook program.  I like using it to read on my PC and then open the books with the accompanying highlights on my tablet for book discussions.  But recently I have run in to a lot of problems getting Freda to work when saving or loading using onedrive.  

I just installed Freda on a new laptop using Win 11.  If I try to set up onedrive I get a message saying "We can't connect to the service right now."  So I save and load by going to the onedrive folder manually. But after loading and saving, I get a lot of books that do not download.  

I've tried to set Freda up with multiple onedrive accounts, reinstalling both onedrive and freda on both the PC and Android tablet.  I've gone into the onedrive folders, both on the PC and the online onedrive folders and tried various things, but none of them have worked.  

I will ask a few questions that might help me to figure out what is going on.  What is the file structure that Freda needs in the onedrive folder.  It seems to be freda/save and then sometimes I see freda/save/books and freda/save/thumbnails.  The folder setup that seems to get close is freda/save where there are bookmarks.xml, library.xml setting.xml, and sources.xml.  An then a directory books where the epub files are stored.  But after working nearly perfectly on a load one time, the next time the books do not download.  If I then place the books in the freda/save folder, the books download but I get a lot of other stuff in the book list.  

I have attached a pic of the file structure that has worked the best.  I had to take a mess of files out of the onedrive folder and clean it up to get this. I've also attached a pic of the error message I get inside Freda on the PC that pops up whenever I try to attach to the onedrive folder.

Any help anyone could give to get Freda back in operation would be much appreciated.  It seems odd to me that there is no good app for reading epubs using cross platform Android and PC.  Freda does it superbly when it works along with a nice interface and lots of notes and highlighting tools.  I would certainly be willing to pay to get such a program.

Thanks in advance.

Steve

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