Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I've looked at this device and I wonder how good the layout engine is. Screenshots never show text with any hyphenation going on which makes me wonder if it even supports hyphenation.

One of the images on the Amazon page for the reader has somebody holding one beside their laptop and if you look at the screen, it looks terrible. There are even words jammed together ("would be most suitable forthe job").

I love that it has physical buttons though. My reader is the Kindle Oasis and the buttons are one of my favorite features of the device. The Oasis layout engine and typography are both pretty good and I wonder if the X4 would end up feeling like a big downgrade.

The alternative firmwares give you a lot more options in this, stock is OK in layout

The layout engine is limited. It does flow text quite well, but when I had mine (the screen broke a few months ago) I was working on adding more features to the rendering engine.

It's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec, but hard to do it well on such a constrained chip. Even things like nested lists and inline code snippets are a challenge.

That must be why Amazon does a lot of pre-processing on their server. They know what device they are sending to and can tailor the file for that device.

Maybe expecting the X4 to look great is asking too much. It took Amazon years to get it right on Kindle. Hyphenation is a difficult task.

Flash Crosspoint. I reflows much better than stock. It also fixes the lack of space between paragraphs.

Sounds like it’s still pretty early days then. I’ll probably hold off for a year or two and check again.

Even a year from now you're still likely to need a custom firmware.

The custom firmware today is more than good enough, and the devices often sell for under $70.

>t's easy to write a HTML & CSS layout engine to support most of the epub spec

And yet reading systems fail to do that.

Custom firmwares support hyphenation

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