0.23.5-beta-readerpreview

This experimental release debuts a dedicated reader assistant workflow for jidoujisho as a separate standalone application. Depending on the reception of this branch, reader functionality may be merged onto the main application.

Only two menu tabs are present in this preview, Dictionary and Reader. The new Reader tab launches an in-app WebView accessing Ttu-Ebook, from which users may upload an EPUB file of their choice and start reading (thanks to 忘我). Selected text will have bilingual or monolingual lookup options, with an option to open the creator.

Developer Note: This release may require more rigorous testing with a wide variety of book formats. If there are any issues related to text selection or Furigana persisting in search or export results, please contact me and let me know.

System Requirements: This preview release has been tested by myself and other users to work on a variety of real-world devices and emulators running Android 7 and above. If the installation fails, try clearing enough storage space.

0.23-beta-readerpreview

• (Preview Feature) Reader Assistant - Users may use the application as a dedicated assistant which allows easy lookup and card creation while reading (feature request by coredump and Rainbowsaur)
• This preview release is minimal and some features from the main branch have been cut to focus on the preview features

0.23.1-beta-readerpreview

• (Preview Feature) Tap to Select for Reading - Tapping on a word will now query the selected text and index for text segmentation (feature request by coredump)
• The tap to select script encapsulates and affects the entire reader area, and consequently images cannot be tapped to be unblurred, users can circumvent this for now by manually unblurring them in the site options

0.23.2-beta-readerpreview

• Fixed an issue where swipe end would count as a tap action and change the word
• Fixed an issue where images could not be clicked on to be unblurred

0.23.3-beta-readerpreview

• Added a filter so that searching for punctuation would not perform redundant dictionary search queries
• Added padding at the bottom of the pop-up dictionary so that the word count could still neatly be seen below
• Fixed an issue where newlines in selected text were not properly encoded and were present as \n in the found for text and when passed to the creator
• Fixed an issue where clicking on the spoiler text ネタバレ in the web reader would result to searching for that word
• Fixed an issue where having copied something in the creator would result to a search for that word when returning to the web reader
• Fixed an issue where monolingual search results would not return spaces in the headword
• Fixed an issue where redundant blank garbage results would return with monolingual results

0.23.4-beta-readerpreview

• Fixed a critical issue where Furigana was improperly included in both tap and drag to select results, resulting to kana appearing after each individual kanji in the search and export term (thanks to Lion Hamster for the report).
• The solution has been tested with several books, but may require further tracking as Furigana syntax may vary between EPUBs

0.23.5-beta-readerpreview

• Fixed an issue where some books in Kobo format with span-encapsulated paragraph text did not work with tap to select (thanks to Sena for the report)
• Fixed an issue where Furigana persisted in span-encapsulated paragraph text in manual drag selection
• Tightened the condition for bypassing search when clicking on the text ネタバレ in the web reader

A dedicated in-application workflow for readers

Developer Note: This is one of the most requested features I've had, and it seems very simple on paper but it was very hard to realize. To start with, extracting content from an EPUB file can be a huge undertaking given all the necessary formatting and how to handle things like Furigana. Existing libraries would not allow the text to be both selectable and well formatted. More than that, there is no easy way to render Flutter text in a vertical orientation, right-to-left scrolling and lazily rendering those individual paragraphs is not a pretty sight in Flutter. One can render it all as RichText spans with a package that takes EPUB converted HTML and renders it as a widget on the Flutter canvas, which is an entirely other rabbit hole of Flutter SDK issues.

At this point, I had given up and instead made several releases towards making it really easy to share text from any source, but it wasn't exactly a dedicated in-app reading experience. I had my eyes set on Ttu-Ebook, which is my favorite reader to use. It has most of the basics set up to start reading in Japanese. I couldn't initially get it to work due to an issue with flutter_inappwebview which couldn't let me import a file, but thanks to a recent pull request I am now finally able to work on this. I also had to learn a bit of JavaScript to allow the WebView to render the context menu when selecting text properly with horizontal scrolling, as it was overlooked in that package.

This has been quite the adventure, and I am now very satisfied to finally fulfill this feature request. Any and all feedback is much appreciated. Read, read, read.

Which file should I download?

The files are split between the different device architectures to save user download bandwidth and storage space. Depending on which device you are using, download the appropriate APK by expanding the "Assets" drop-down menu below.

Test each APK available for each architecture. If you're not sure, the arm64 download should be suitable for most mobile devices.