Reading Partner v0.16.1 — EPUB as paper pages

An EPUB is now the same thing a PDF is on the desk: sheets of paper. 0.16.0 shipped EPUBs as reflowing text in the app's own typography; that is gone. A book is laid out once into fixed 6×9-inch pages with fonts the app ships (Noto Serif and Noto Serif CJK), so a page is the same page on every device, the top bar counts real pages, and Zoom, Fit page and Paged flip are the controls a PDF has.

The book's own stylesheets are kept: title pages, chapter heads, code blocks and tables look the way the publisher set them, after a pass that removes scripts, inline handlers and anything that would reach outside the page. Books with a cover image show it on the shelf, with the author. Books from a printed edition show their printed page numbers beside the marks.

Highlights, underlines and the AI pen are back on the new pages, and ink joins them: a free stroke is stored in page coordinates like on a PDF. Touch on an EPUB now goes through the same gesture routing the PDF pages use — swipe to flip, pinch to zoom, draw with a finger when that setting is on — and a long press no longer raises the system selection menu.

Also

• Opening a large book shows its pagination progress in the top bar instead of a blank reader.
• [p.N] in notes and lessons now means the page you see. Books opened under 0.16.0 are re-paginated once on first open; their marks keep their place by CFI, and figure and full-text indexes are rebuilt.
• A stale cover failure written by the PDF engine no longer hides an EPUB's cover for a day.

Known limitations

• An EPUB sent to the app from another iPad app is not received yet; open it through the app's own picker.
• Pages are cut on the device that opens the book first. Another device may fit a line more or less on a page; the page boundaries stay where the table says, so numbers never drift.
• Verified on the iPad simulator, not on a physical device.