Hi, I just downloaded Freda, and so far I am liking it. But I am reading a medical book for a quite weakened person, highlighting or excerpting if you will,the important passages for her to read later. 
It would be great to have the chance to select a part of text, then when highlighting it, auto create an entry allowing to directly navigate between highlights while still keeping the highlighted bit in the context of the page. A kind of "navigable index of highlights" if you will.

I understand that I can do the highlighting then create a bookmark and copy/paste the text in the provided text box, but it is quite contrived and lenghty.

would this be a possible option to be implemented? 

Thanks

I have purchased several third party text to speech voices for my PC and I would love to be able to use them while reading books aloud.
Thank you.

• Implemented CSS  ‘position’ attribute values ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’.
  
• Implemented CSS  attribute  background-image: url("path/to/image.ext").
  
• Forced the read-aloud language code to always be just two letters (so EN-AU becomes EN for instance), which avoids the issue that a possibly reasonable language is getting left off the list of available languages.
  
• ‘text-to-speech applies emphasis’ is an optional setting, default no. Because Microsoft’s default voices produce an idiotic drawl when reading emphasised text.
  
• ‘text-to-speech pronounces image descriptions’ is an optional setting, default yes. Because sometimes a book has all sorts of rubbish in images’ alt-text, and we don’t want to hear it read out.
  
• Implemented ‘advanced rendering’ behaviour for TXT and FB2 books, so that the CFI-saving of bookmarks works for them too (I will eventually want to get rid of the legacy rendering mode altogether – and need to be forward-compatible with this change).
  
• For Android only (because Windows UWP apps don't have multiple TTS engines), added a dropdown to choose which text-to-speech engine will be used, if there are several of them installed.
  
• PDF pages can optionally have their margins trimmed (i.e. cut down to the rectangle containing non-white pixels). 
  
• Implemented a special ‘settings to use for this book only’ preset.  It appears in the preset list, with a name like "for current book" which you can save settings to, or load (if you wanted to restore some setting you'd changed). When you come to re-open the book, Freda looks to see whether you've previously saved a "for current book" preset for it, and if so, Freda will load it. [potential gotcha – there’s no easy way to make this preset ‘unload’ when you subsequently aren’t reading this particular book]
  
• Image viewer: Now provides a ‘rotate 90 degrees’ button, and on Windows, a full-screen view and add accessible controls / buttons for zoom in/out and pan.
  
• Added a setting to tell text-to-speech to 'skip'  some characters (noting that ~ * _ seem to be particularly annoying).
  
• When a ‘folder’ or ‘storage card’ book source is created, it now gets a default label that’s localised into the right language. [note: storage card exists only on Android]
  
• Bug Fix: The code for squeezing table columns to fit their content is not working (it's giving up when floats were present, failing to account for margin/padding on image elements … )
  
• Bug Fix: (Android)  Windows-1251 and 1252 encodings are not working (it needed a change to the .NET build options for the project, to make it work in Release builds)
  
• Bug Fix: Read-aloud is failing to proceed to the next chapter in some cases (in fact, when the chapter begins with a paragraph consisting only of non-selectable ‘formatting’ images.
  
• Bug Fix: The margin of left-floating elements is applied wrongly to the ‘float formatting context’ meaning that it can over-write the content that is meant to be floating round it to the right.
  
• Bug Fix: The width of a floated image should default to the actual width of the image in the file, rather than the layout-width of the block containing it.
  
• Bug Fix: (Windows) When GoogleDrive redirects to an app-specific URL in its auth workflow, it uses the same URL for Freda, Freda+ and Freda-Chinese.  So if more than one of them is installed, the results will be random, and not very nice.  The three apps should use three different uri schemes.
  

Hello again,

Some of the books I now have in Freda I want to delete but every time I delete the book, then do a merge, the book reappears.

Is there some way to permanently delete books from Freda?  Thanks.

Paul

Hi

Wanted to ask how you can update cover pics and other metadata for a book?

Thanks

Love Freda!  Use it on my laptop for a lot of reading.  For the price, it's a gift to the world.  Thank you!

I've hit a weird and consistent problem on Windows 10.  If I am playing audio in another app on the same Windows laptop (tested with Spotify app and a YouTube video through a browser) and I'm listening to the audio through a Bluetooth speaker, then every time I open a Freda book, the audio - say, music - goes silent and cannot be heard.  If I switch away from Freda, music is heard again.  

Unfortunately, this kills my ability to read in Freda while streaming music (or any other audio) to a room speaker.  This has forced me to use alternative ebook readers (none of which are as good!) for this scenario.

More clues:

• Freda does not silence the music if I'm using the laptop's speakers - only when using an external Bluetooth speaker connected to the laptop.
  
• Silencing does not occur when I'm looking at Freda bookshelf, only when viewing inside a book in Freda.
  
• Silencing only happens when Freda is the active app.  If Freda is open in the background, music can be heard.  But as soon as I "Alt-Tab" (or otherwise switch) to Freda, music silences.  If I switch to any other app (or Windows desktop), music comes through fine.  Even if Freda is active in book-reading mode (i.e. music is silenced) and I just Alt-Tab to show the other open Windows apps, the music resumes while the Alt-Tab overlay is active.
  
• Freda's text-to-speech function (which I don't use, but tested for this) works through the Bluetooth speaker.  The speech is heard fine, even as other audio playing in another app is silenced.  This leads me to wonder if, on Bluetooth, somehow Freda is too aggressive or exclusive in taking control of the audio stream?  It silences the other apps even when no speech is being played in Freda.  (My ideal would be: Freda never interrupts audio stream unless text-to-speech is active, and when text-to-speech is active, other audio sources are only turned down and mixed in, not silenced.  This way I could listen to text-to-speech with music in the background.) 
  
• Doesn't matter if using Freda free version or Freda Plus.
  
• Doesn't matter if Freda is full-screen or windowed.
  
• If I open same book in Calibre, audio issue does not occur (i.e. I can hear music while reading in Calibre -- didn't test text-to-speech in Calibre).
  
• I couldn't find any controls in Freda to prevent / exclude / turn off text-to-speech feature, which I'm guessing is involved.
  

1. Play Spotify on laptop speakers.
   
2. Load Freda and read book (no problem so far).
   
3. Leave Freda (can't remember if I closed it or just went to a different app).
   
4. Turn on Bluetooth in Windows and redirect Spotify music to Bluetooth speaker.
   
5. Come back to Freda in book-reading mode -- Audio continues to play!  (very unusual)
   
6. Alt-Tab away from Freda, music continues to play (as normal)
   
7. Alt-Tab back to Freda -- as usual, music is silenced.
   

It would be wonderful to have this feature - I found myself constantly switching between a few presets for different books (especially for books of different languages, where different fonts / spacing / margins / etc. are desired).

Some ebook readers I used in the past had this feature (I imagine it's maybe not too difficult to implement?) They also offer some sort of default preset to bootstrap a book when it's imported (in freda's case, I guess it would just be the global settings).

P.S. This is my first post here, big thanks to the devs who have done excellent job on the app (I use the Windows app, I notice that there's Android now as well, which is good to know!).

Getting "System does not support 'windows-1251' encoding" on Android (FB2).

On Windows, the same file opens just fine.

Is there any way to enable support for this encoding?

Freda update 4.36, 3rd September 2020: Change Log

• Render PDF files, displaying the pages as PNG images, using the built-in Windows and Android PDF components.
  
• Better fallback logic for cases where the advanced parser barfs; first try simplified layout, then try flattened – which should basically just emit the text without formatting or aligning it in any way at all
  
• Fix 'float' and 'clear' logic to align better with CSS standards (e.g. force a move below the float(s) in response to an applicable 'clear').  Generally trying to do the best job I can, without (yet) implementing the Block Formatting Context in all its gory horror.
  
• Better handling of block elements embedded inside inline elements.
  
• Better treatment of start-of-paragraph in justified text.
  
• (Android) Ask for permission when it's required for storage card access / save log file / backup (save/restore/merge)
  
• BUG FIX: When the Mobi-parser (or any other thing) creates an epub having elements with HTML that sets width and height attributes, ignore these, unless they are on images.  Such attributes should only be set by CSS not by HTML.
  
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fix an issue with multi-line text boxes – where keyboard characters like []{}\|’@#~ were getting ignored. 
  
• BUG FIX: Fix odd behaviour (and some stack overflow crashes) with getting/selecting paragraphs, sentences and sections, including when this is done by the 'read aloud' function.
  
• BUG FIX: ‘Read Aloud’ function now starts at the beginning of the selected text (a regression bug meant that it was starting from the start of the paragraph instead)
  
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fixed an issue where the BookReaderPage menu ribbons would get into in a funny state, where they can’t be popped out (because they immediately close again). 
  

Hi, i've been using the app for a while but yesterday the translation tool stopp working.

Whatever the word input is the translation I get as an output is '???'

I've tried with different languages, different books, words that i had previously translated but nothing seems to get it back to normal.

Even tried reinstalling the app. Any hint on how to solve this?