The last few weeks I've been working on a complete revision of how large images are presented. If you head over to the download section you'll find a sort of test-of-concept, which I'd very much like feedback on. My thought is to handle tables in the same manner, so before I start working on that, I'd like to have some opinions from you lot if you like it or not. I'd rather not have to do the table-stuff twice if I can avoid it. :)

And as always, if you have any ideas on how to improve Vade Mecum, please let me know.

/Henrik

I got some feedback indicating that people were having trouble with their settings disappearing on restarts. This occurred mainly when Vade Mecum had been installed to a non-default place. That problem should now be fixed in release 0.6.3. (Hopefully!) So go and grab it.

On another note. Development has been kind of slow since the last update. I've been having very little time on my hands due to other commitments, plus the features I have in mind have been harder to do than I anticipated. Those features are mainly some sort of browser for annotations and highlights and support for tables. I don't yet have a clear picture of how I want the browser to look and work (so if you have suggestions you are welcome to let me know), but I hope to have at least a semi-working version out before summer.

I've also gotten a lot of letters asking for support for PocketPC 2000. Sadly, Vade Mecum does not currently support that platform, and I have no time or hardware to do the necessary fixes myself. If anyone feels the urge to try you are more than welcome. The source is freely available to toy with, and if you get it working don't hesitate to contact me. I know that some people would be very happy with this.

/Henrik

A month into the new year, I am happy to bring you Vade Mecum 0.6.2 with a few bugfixes. Among the most important of these are:

• In-page links going to the wrong line; now fixed (properly I hope)
• Thai users can now disable soft hyphens for correct displays
• The settings file has been moved to the Vade Mecum directory. You are free to delete \My Documents\vade-mecum.dat after installing this update.

Some of these fixes means that the old settings file will be disregarded, so you need to input your settings again. This is not a bug, it's a feature. :) Jokes aside, I know that some users have had trouble with the settings file when updating VM. The code for loading and saving the settings need to be re-worked a bit to make updating easier and I will get to that, but I haven't had time for that quite yet. With a bit of luck it should be done for the next release. I have also updated this page a little with a history section. Just so everyone knows how things started...

I've gotten quite a few mails from users letting me know of bugs, asking for new features and generally being happy with Vade Mecum. Thanks all of you! I really appreciate this sort of input, and I would like to encourage all the rest of you to let me know if you have any thoughts regarding VM. I've said it before, but it stands repeating. Anyways, just head into the downloads section and enjoy.

/Henrik

Timely for Christmas I am happy to announce a new release with a few bugfixes. These are mainly related to formatting and/or images. If you were having troubles with images being formatted strangely before, you should be happy with the fixes. At least I hope so. Thanks to all of you who pointed out the bugs, I wouldn't have found them without you. If anyone finds any type of anomalous behaviour in Vade Mecum, don't hesitate to send me a mail.

There are still a few bugs I have been made aware of that I have hopes and ideas of how to fix. Since it is drawing near the end of term and I have a few exams that need taken care of, unfortunately those bugs will have wait until next year. The next release should hopefully be out sometime in February.

Also, a few people have expressed an interest in compiling Vade Mecum for smartphones. I don't know yet if it is going to work, but I have hopes that someday Vade Mecum won't be restricted to the ARM Pocket PC. Let's all hope, shall we.

This being the last I am going to write this year, I have only to wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I hope that next year will bring some great new features to Vade Mecum.

/Henrik

I have been a little confused about the version numbers. Therefore I have now decided that the release made on Monday will be named 0.6 instead (+I have fixed one or two bugs in the image viewer). From now on, releases that introduce major new features will will be upgraded in their major version (currently 6), while minor bugfixes will get a minor version bump. I am sorry if all this has confused you, I can only blame it on being new on this project...

Also, if any of you were wondering why I release such buggy code. I feel that I don't have enough time to test all new features thoroughly, under all possible conditions. Instead I feel that it's better to get those features out to you as soon as possible, so that I can get feedback at an early stage. This means, of course, that I desperately need your input. If anything doesn't work as you expected, or you don't like how things work, please let me know and I will do my best to accomodate your wishes as far as possible.

/Henrik

I am very happy to announce that there is now a new release ready for downloading. Among the new features in version 0.5.5 alpha are:

• 16 bit images no longer turn out black. This turned out to be a bug in the code we borrowed from Plucker... I will let them know...
• Pagination for very large records have been fixed.
• The scrollbar didn't work very well with very large record. Fixed.
• A progress bar has been added to the search dialog.
• The output when searching has been changed. Should now be a bit more intuitive.
• Composite images are now supported!! This brings Vade Mecum one step closer to full compatibility.
• Images that don't fit in the reader are now automatically resized to fit.
• If you need to watch those large images in fullsize, just click the image in the reader. A new image viewer dialog has been added where you'll be able to scroll the image in all directions and zoom in and out of it.
• A new page has been added in the settings dialog. Right now it only contains a single option: Choose whether or not the first paragraph of each record should be used as the record title, if no such title exists.

I hope that you'll find these new features useful. There are a few snags however. Searching has become a little slower with the addition of the progress bar. This will be worked out in later releases, but will probably not be on top of my priority list right now. I hope that you'll be able to live with that. Also you will probably have do delete all your metadata files after you have installed this release. This is because a lot of changes have been made to the format. Those are the files that end with .vdm in the same directory as your books.

Please note that this is still in alpha and that bugs may occur. If you find any, please send me a note and I'll do my best to fix them for the next release. Happy reading!

/Henrik

A faq has been created for all you trouble-shooting. So far it is kind of limited, but new entries will be created as questions arise. If you have any questions, please feel free to mail me.

/Henrik

It seems that a lot of people are having problems when upgrading to 0.5.1. Most of these problems stems from the config file being incompatible. I'm not sure why this is so, but if you have problems when upgrading try deleting vade-mecum.dat in \My Documents. Then you will have to reset your settings. If that still doesn't work, you are most welcome to contact me.

Meanwhile, I am working on bringing composite images to work in Vade Mecum. My plan is to scale the images that are too wide to fit, and to create a dialog to view the images in full size. I hope that this will work out satisfyingly. A new release should be available in a few weeks, so stay tuned.

/Henrik

I am happy to announce that I have joined Jamis in developing Vade-Mecum. To celebrate that, we have released a new version, 0.5.1 alpha. Improvements include:

• Searching: Use the search dialog and the arrow icons
• Continuous pages: Be able to read your long e-books in Vade-Mecum
• Basic support for navigation metadata
• and many more small improvements and bugfixes

As you can see, we have skipped directly to 0.5. For those of you who have been compiling yourselves from the CVS repository you'll notice that the changes that were made for 0.4 were made by Jamis, and those for this version were made mostly by me.

I hope to be able to continue development and add more features in time. I've gotten some good suggestions for new features but I'd like even more. So don't hesitate to send your thoughts. Bug reports are also highly appreciated. Since this is still in alpha things aren't exactly thoroughly tested when released. At least they won't be from now on, since I want to be able to share the goodies as soon as possible. :)

If you had managed to snag the 0.5 release, make sure to get 0.5.1 instead. It solves a few bugs that would cause Vade-Mecum to crash under certain conditions when searching. So make sure to go to the downloads section and get this release.

Yours truly, Henrik Kjoelhede

Yay! Version 0.3 alpha is available, and adds the following new features to the reader:

• Document categories
• Filter the library listing by document category
• Delete documents via the library interface
• An alternate progress meter, which draws a single red line on one side of the screen and indicates how far you are through the current page
• Exit Vade Mecum directly from the reader interface, and return there directly when starting Vade Mecum next time
• Toggle the toolbar quickly on/off by tapping a "hot-spot" position on the screen (you can choose one of four different pre-defined hot-spots)

Many bugs have been fixed as well, including problems with the color picker.

Best of all, though, is that version 0.3 now sports an automated installer! Grab the .exe file and run it on your PC to install Vade Mecum on your PDA. Or, if you don't have a Windows PC, grab the CAB file and copy it to your PDA. Then, you can execute the CAB file on your device and have Vade Mecum install itself there. Slick, huh?

No screenshots of the new version yet, but they'll be up soonish, I hope...

It looks like documents generated by JPluck 2.0 were crashing for me because I wasn't setting the input encoding. Setting it to UTF-8 seems to work. I need to do some more investigating as to why the default input encoding causes crashes...

In other news, if you use an SD card to store either your books or your metadata, beware! Versions 0.1 and 0.2 of Vade Mecum may cause your SD card to be erased if you have to reboot your device while Vade Mecum is running. This is because of an issue with the cards themselves, where a reboot of the device while files are open on the card can cause the data on the card to disappear.

The version in CVS fixes this problem (by closing all file handles when they are not in use); this may result in slower performance in some instances, but it seems to work fine on my (300 Mhz) device.

I should have version 0.3 ready in a week or two, if all goes well. The most significant new feature of 0.3 will be library and category management.

Well, I don't know why, but it appears that some documents generated using JPluck 2.0 (prerelease 12) will cause Vade Mecum to crash. The same documents generated using JPluck 0.9 seem to be fine... I'll be looking into it, but in the meantime, if you use Vade Mecum you may want to stick with either the Python-based pluck system, or use JPluck 0.9.

Stay tuned...

Released version 0.2 alpha. IMPORTANT: If you have version 0.1 installed, you MUST remove all of the metadata files, the metadata.vmd file, and the vade-mecum.dat file before installing this version. Failure to do so may cause your device to freeze up when you try to open Vade Mecum. Sorry about this; from here on out, such drastic measures should not be necessary when installing a new version.

This version incorporates the following changes (including both added features and bug fixes):

• Added history supported. You can now go back to previously viewed pages, and then forward again (just as in a web browser). There is currently a limit of 10 items in the history... at some point, this limit will be customizable.
• You can now sort the library list by tapping the column header for the column you want to sort on (title or file size).
• The fullscreen setting is now persistent.
• There are now options on the Reader settings tab for enabling or disabling the "auto link up" and "auto link down" features (ie, scrolling up at the top of a page automatically follows the first link on the page, and scrolling down at the bottom of a page automatically follows the last link on the page).
• Documents without a "title" attribute now correctly display an alternate title.
• Added a minimum special interparagraph space (for when a paragraph or its prior paragraph is right- or center-aligned, or when the left margin changes between paragraphs). This value is not currently user-modifiable, but makes things look much prettier when using a book-like format setting (see screenshots).
• Fixed percentage report when reopening a previously opened page
• Fixed minimum special interparagraph space computation to only happen once per paragraph
• Fixed a bug that caused the program to crash while paginating if the page had 5 or more images on it.
• File suffixes on metadata files are now being added correctly.