Allow each book to use its own preset

[newguy]

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!).

[jim_chapman]

Thank you for the suggestion. It is indeed something that Freda used to support (way back in the day, on Windows PocketPC, WinCE and so forth) - and it was useful from time to time. In the current Freda design, it might look like a special preset, in the preset list, with a name like "<for current book>" which you could save settings to, or load (if you wanted to restore some setting you'd changed). And when you came to re-open the book, Freda would look to see whether you'd previously saved a "<for current book>" preset for it, and if so, Freda would load it.

I'll include it in my 'to do' list for future development.

[newguy]

Thank you for the suggestion.  It is indeed something that Freda used to support (way back in the day, on Windows PocketPC, WinCE and so forth) - and it was useful from time to time.  In the current Freda design, it might look like a special preset, in the preset list, with a name like  "<for current book>" which you could save settings to, or load (if you wanted to restore some setting you'd changed).  And when you came to re-open the book, Freda would look to see whether you'd previously saved a "<for current book>" preset for it, and if so, Freda would load it.

I'll include it in my 'to do' list for future development.

Thanks, that sounds great!

[newguy]

@jim_chapman I found out this was in the app a while ago, that's quite fast I've been testing it for the last couple weeks or so, and think I might have found some bug.

To reproduce the bug:

1. go to any book, use `This Book` preset to save some settings for this book
2. go back to bookself
3. quit the app
4. reopen the app, and observe that all the settings in the app seem to have been reset to defaults (e.g., background color, control settings, etc.)

If I open the book with its own preset in 1., those settings are still applied - just that now with the 'base' settings reset to defaults, the overall effect is different.

I suspect that when a book's preset gets applied, the base settings it applied on top of is lost in a way that it can no longer persist till the next run of the app. Maybe there needs to be a hidden 'base' preset, which gets updated whenever any settings get changed, that can then serve as the starting preset to use on app load... (that's just my 2cents)

EDIT: I retract my words - I've somehow 'fixed' my problem. I was scrolling my book list and found a book called 'settings'. When I opened it, it showed something like a xml. I deleted it and now I don't have the same problem if I follow the same steps above... I'm not sure how it ended up there though. Anyway - thanks for getting this feature implemented! It is super useful to me

EDIT2: I retract my words again - the problem has reappeared after a reboot...

[jim_chapman]

@jim_chapman I found out this was in the app a while ago, that's quite fast I've been testing it for the last couple weeks or so, and think I might have found some bug.

To reproduce the bug:

1. go to any book, use `This Book` preset to save some settings for this book
2. go back to bookself
3. quit the app
4. reopen the app, and observe that all the settings in the app seem to have been reset to defaults (e.g., background color, control settings, etc.)

If I open the book with its own preset in 1., those settings are still applied - just that now with the 'base' settings reset to defaults, the overall effect is different.

I suspect that when a book's preset gets applied, the base settings it applied on top of  is lost in a way that it can no longer persist till the next run of the app. Maybe there needs to be a hidden 'base' preset, which gets updated whenever any settings get changed, that can then serve as the starting preset to use on app load... (that's just my 2cents)

EDIT: I retract my words - I've somehow 'fixed' my problem. I was scrolling my book list and found a book called 'settings'. When I opened it, it showed something like a xml. I deleted it and now I don't have the same problem if I follow the same steps above... I'm not sure how it ended up there though. Anyway - thanks for getting this feature implemented! It is super useful to me

EDIT2: I retract my words again - the problem has reappeared after a reboot...

Yes I am seeing this problem on one device too - but I don't think it's specifically caused by the book-specific preset, because I saw this happen when I wasn't using the book-specific preset at all.  Rather, it seems just to happen randomly from time to time.  I am looking into it.

[newguy]

As a quick update - I'm still encountering the issue on a day to day basis. To alleviate the pain I'm keeping Freda app open as long as possible, but this seems to reappear quite consistently these days on each app restart.

I'm considering to delete all my books and reinstall from scratch to try my luck at some point, oh well...

[jim_chapman]

As a quick update - I'm still encountering the issue on a day to day basis. To alleviate the pain I'm keeping Freda app open as long as possible, but this seems to reappear quite consistently these days on each app restart.

I'm considering to delete all my books and reinstall from scratch to try my luck at some point, oh well...

I do have a new release coming out in the next few weeks, which changes the code so it takes more care to avoid concurrency issues when loading and changing settings.  That might help your situation.