Page turning on e-ink screens

By EvanWrites, 23 September, 2024
Forums
DubScript on tablets

I love Dubscript. Thank you for making it!!

I use Dubscript on a 6" e-ink tablet, and it's absolutely a great way to write Fountain files on this device. And it's *almost* perfect for reading Fountain files, too. Except...

The scroll buttons on the bottom of the screen cover up text, and turning the page advances past the covered text. GIF here.

I know that I can turn off the bottom bar, but I actually want to keep those page-turning buttons. Page-turning is *crucial* on e-ink screens, where scrolling is cumbersome.

The ideal solution could be transparent scroll buttons, so I'm able to read the text AND click to advance the page. You can see these kinds of buttons in use in the Android app EinkBro. Another solution would be to limit the page advance so that the text currently covered by the buttons becomes the top line of the next advance.

Thank you for all your work on this!

Software:
Dubscript 1.0 RC253
Android 8.1.0

Hardware:
Boyue Likebook P6

Ron

7 months 1 week ago

First-- it's very cool to see the app in e-ink!

So to be clear, are you talking about a fully transparent button with perhaps a frame around it (to show the borders) or would that still be too obscuring of the text below?  Or do you mean an 100% "invisible" yet touchable button area?  how does the e-ink handle transparency, if there there were to be say a 20% transparent button-- would you still be able to see the text and find the button as well? I'm unsure if the e-ink screens these days can handle transparency or whether it might use some kind of dithering effect or something else?

Reducing the size of the script-area might be an option, but the ideal solution would be some kind of compromise to get maximum benefit from the full screen.  What do you think of an "outline mode"?


R

 

Ron

7 months 1 week ago

I whipped up a transparent button that keeps the ^ and v  icons as well as the shadow of the button and that seems to work pretty well with the button shadow appearing as a "suggestion" of the contours of where the button is, but I'd like to make sure that transparency is handled well with e-ink.

I may try putting this in the next beta release.  Do you currently use that?

Thank you! Really excited for this.
I've seen a couple effective designs for buttons on e-ink.
Here's one from Einkbro: it's simply a thin dotted line around the button in the lower corners.
I've also seen e-ink apps that don't mark the buttons at all, and just have large unmarked "tap zones." That's not exactly ideal, but it's caught on because so many reading apps just use identical zones: Tap on the right side to turn to the next page, etc.

I signed up for the beta! Excited to try it. I won't be able to use it on my e-ink tablet because I don't have Google Play on that device, but I'll try it on my Android phone and just pretend I'm on an e-reader.

Thank you again!

Hey Evan--

Version 1.0.2 is out in beta now!  Please give it a try.  Sorry I waited a few extra days just because Android 15 was released and I wanted to check for any new reports of issues (didn't detect any), so let me know if this works.  If not, maybe I can adjust the level of transparency and/or look into doing some kind of dotted line around the button.  It is a very very light transparency, so hopefully will be dithered in a way that allows you to read what's underneath it.  Let me know!

 

Thanks for testing!

 

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