Hi Donna, Brett, and Others,
I'll add to Brett's post of my earlier discussion of how to use
Stanza, and cc this to the macvisionaries list. I think the issue that
Paul and others have with using Stanza's iPhone app to read ePub books
is getting past a cover image or title page. This is pretty standard
for most eReader apps (including Kobo Books), since VoiceOver only
reads continuously till the end of a chapter (and might pause on a
title page with a cover graphic). A general thing to try with these
apps is double tapping the center of the screen to bring up page
controls. Then you can just use the Bookmarks Icon in the bottom left
corner of the screen to access the table of contents for the book and
advance to the first chapter. When you double tap "I. Down the Rabbit
Hole" for Alice in Wonderland, for example, you'll be moved to that
point in the book, the page controls will disappear, and VoiceOver
will start reading the chapter. (This is specifically checked for the
current version of the Stanza app on an iPhone 4 with the latest iOS
4.1, in response to Paul's statement that Stanza doesn't work on the
iPhone 4.) On the iPad, and on devices with earlier versions of iOS
4, you may have to explicitly double tap the center of the screen to
toggle page controls off again and do a two finger flick down to
resume reading. You can control all this via keyboard shortcuts under
iOS 4.1.
Stanza does not update the touch screen content while it reads the
chapter, so if you were to touch the screen, you'd be taken back to
the beginning of the chapter, but the Stanza eReader app has a number
of other features. You can set multiple bookmarks (which you cannot
do in Kobo books with the page transition mode set to "scrolling" for
accessible navigation), and you can move to specific pages in books if
you use the "Find Icon" button search facility of page controls to
search for a specific phrase. You can also change the page of the
book displayed on the screen while focused on the position slider (at
the bottom of the screen when page controls are toggled on) by
flicking up or down or via keyboard shortcut in iOS 4.1 (when the
rotor is set to "Adjust Value"), or by using the double tap and hold
pass through gesture and sliding your finger right or left. The
problem is that the movement steps are rather coarse for a long book
if you navigate with the position slider on an iPhone screen.
The search function in Stanza was implemented before iBooks got this,
and is very fast -- faster than in iBooks or Kobo Books when you load
the same eBook and run a search. Navigating back to the "Find Icon"
button shows you your last search results (which you can clear), and
you can also navigate to the "More Icon" button (bottom right corner
of screen) and double tap the "Find next" button to go to the next
page that matches your search results. (This is all simpler to do via
keyboard shortcut control).
There's a Dictionary under the "More Icon" button, so you can look up
a word, and then go back to reading your text. Again, this is
simplest to use with the keyboard controls in OS 4.1 to navigate and
type in the words.
The functions that I like most, apart from the diversity of the store
offerings in Stanza, are the multiple bookmarking functions and the
ease of loading books into the app, which can be done wirelessly in
several alternate ways in addition to using syncing with iTunes. I'll
bring up page controls and search for a phrase on the page that's just
been read ("Find Icon, button"), in order to navigate to that page.
Then I'll double tap the "Bookmarks, button", and double tap
"Bookmarks" at the bottom center of the screen, double tap the "Edit"
button in the top right corner, and use "Bookmark Current Page". I
can assign a name to this. (This is also easy to do with keyboard
control).
In Stanza, and also in Kobo Books since version 3.4, if you point to
an ePub document on the web, you can choose to download it into these
compatible applications. Try this from your iPhone or iPod Touch with
the Baen Cryoburn distribution CD site:
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/24-CryoburnCD/CryoburnCD/index.htm
Navigate to any of the book links, and then activate the link for the
EPUB/Nook/Stanza version of the book by double tapping. In Safari,
double tap the button for "Open In" and choose the app (such as
"Stanza" or "Kobo"). The book will download to the library of that
app and, since Baen releases their books without DRM, will be readable
in the app. (Note that your app will open in the book you are
currently reading, but if you check your library you'll find the new
book there.) Stanza can also download from your Dropbox file if you
point it to a URL of an ePub file in your public file, as well as
allowing transfers through Wi-Fi via the Stanza Desktop application.
The above also works for the iPad. For those of you who prefer other
eBook content than "military sf" science fiction, try going to the
ePubbooks site:
http://www.epubbooks.com/
You'll have to use their search function or links to navigate to
individual book pages to get to ePub download links (announced with
the download size), but activating those links from your iDevice with
apps such as Stanza or Kobo books will also let you download directly
into the app. This does not work for iBooks -- you must download and
add these to iTunes on your computer, then sync these books to you
iDevice in order to get them into iBooks.
I'll just briefly summarize the screen layout when page controls are
brought up in Stanza by double tapping in the central text region of
the screen (or by using VO-space with a keyboard).
At the top of the page controls screen, from left to right:
"Back Icon, button" at top left corner (takes you back to your main
screen with "Library" selected to show contents of your library)
heading announcing book title (top center)
"Info Icon, button" at top right corner (gives Book Info description;
if you double tap the "Edit" button in the top right of this screen,
you can edit the Title, Author, and Subject information, and also
delete the book from the app library)
At the center of the screen: page information with Chapter name and
position information (e.g. "Page 1/24", "0% into book")
At the bottom of the screen, from left to right:
"Bookmarks Icon, button" at bottom left corner (takes you to Table of
Contents for navigation of your book; there's also a "Bookmarks,
button" that lists your current bookmarks for selection and
navigation, and an "Edit" button to let you add your current page to
the bookmarks.
"Gear Icon, button" (Settings control of font type, size, font and
background color, and whether to "Use night theme")
"Theme Invert Icon, button") at bottom center (inverts black and white
colors)
"Find Icon, button") type in search terms to find context matches
throughout the book, and navigate to those pages
"More Icon, button") at bottom right corner (delete books, find next,
use dictionary, etc.)
From the main Stanza page (with "Library", "Get Books", "Now
Reading", and "Info" button along the bottom), the "Info" button has
entries for "Settings" and for the "Online Help". In the "Settings"
entries I disable Cover Flow ("switch button off") and also turn off
"Show tips".
HTH. Cheers,
Esther
On Oct 28, 2010, at 01:35, Brett wrote:
Hi Donna,
Here is part of a post written a while ago from Estha, which should
help to get you going with Stanza.
For the last few versions I have been able to read through every
book I've tried with Stanza using VoiceOver, but the big caveat is
that the top screen
doesn't update, or at least, it doesn't update on the iPod Touch.
What it will do is read through the text continuously (unless you
pause it with a two
finger double tap) through till the end of the Chapter. If you want
to go to the next chapter, you can double tap the "Bookmarks" button
in the bottom
left corner and select the next chapter. Or, if you want to update
the current page you can use the information you get when you bring
up page controls
(double tap the center of the screen), where it will announce where
you are in the current chapter (e.g., page 1 of 15). Then, if you
want to move to
some other page (like 13), you can toggle VoiceOver off and tap the
right side of the screen 12 times to advance, and toggle VoiceOver
on again. Or, you
can do a search for the last few words that were read to you, and
you'll get a list of matching sentence contexts and their pages, and
you can double tap
and go to that page. All these methods work for me on both the iPod
Touch and the iPad, and they work better on the iPod Touch since the
iOS 4 upgrade
(both because of the new version release of Stanza, and because of
the robustness of the shift to iOS 4). I would occasionally have to
toggle VoiceOver
off to tap the center of the screen and bring up the page controls
before the iOS 4 upgrade, but haven't found this to be the case
since the update.
But all these comments are for ePub books.
I haven't done much testing on PDFs, although Stanza will read
them. Natively, it is supposed to read the widest variety of input
formats. I just don't
know the answer to how it would perform (under VoiceOver) on formats
like your scanned RTF files, which it's also supposed to be able to
read. Also, all
ePub files (including those you create yourself) are not created
equal, and all eBook readers are not equally tolerant of non-
compliant formatting. For
example, you won't get created tables of contents with chapter
locations if you simply convert from a PDF to ePub. You're not
likely to have these difficulties
with publisher's books, but you really should decide whether the
interface is one you can work with.
Hope this helps,
Brett.
On 10/28/2010 1:24 AM, Donna Slater wrote:
I am intrigued, how do you manage to read with VoiceOver and
stanza? I have played with it for a while and although I can
access the controls I cannot get VoiceOver to read a page. Thanks
yet again for any help. Donna.
Sent from my iPhone
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