06-28-2018, 08:44 AM
(06-27-2018, 11:22 PM)jscraig Wrote: Is it possible to incorporate a PDF reading capability into Freda? I read a fair number of academic works in that format, and it would be nice to use the same reader for them. My current reader of choice on Android, Moon+ Reader, does have both mobi/epub and pdf reading in the premium version, but it is only available on Android, and I would really like to use one reader that offers multi-device synchonization and is cross-platform (Windows/Android).
Thank you for Freda!
I did try adding PDF support to Freda, a couple of months back, on an experimental basis. The outcome of that experiment was that the PDF support added significant bloat to the app, and made it somewhat less stable. And Freda did not do a particularly good job of deciphering the content of the PDF file either (words broken up, headings in the wrong places, images out of sequence, ... ). If I had been ready to spend thousands of dollars on a commercial license for a third party PDF-decoder component, it might have been possible to get a better result, but Freda does not generate enough revenue to cover that kind of expense. I suspect that the Moon+ developers have more money behind them ;-)
It is a decision that I could revisit in the future, if better/cheaper PDF-decoder components become available. For the experimental build, I used the SyncFusion 'EssentialPDF' tool, which looked promising ... but unfortunately a number of vital features are still missing for Freda's build environments (Windows UWP and Xamarin .Net). As such, the quality of PDF rendering was simply not good enough, and I am sure that if I had published feature officially, I would have received stacks of one-star reviews "Freda's PDF rendering sucks"; because of the way that the App Stores work, one-star views are a real disaster. If I can't do it well, it is better not to do it at all.
As an alternative, I would suggest you convert your PDF file to EPUB format, and then read the EPUB on Freda. The best tool for doing that conversion is Calibre (see here).