last modified:
2024-03-15 17:52:56
Frank Fuhlbrück's site (IT und FOSS)

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modern computer flatboat

modern computer flatboat is a mobile pdf viewer written in Qt and using MuPDF's libfitz.

animated gif, shows, how the column mode worksanimated gif, presents the annotation feature

Some of flatboat's features are (for other features see the help page):

  • a column mode
  • an in-document history
  • writing support for ink annotations and text annotations

The column mode, is designed for (multicolumn) PDFs with tiny font and few images. By joining horizontally overlapping text regions flatboat tries to detect columns.

Every time you “jump” (e.g. follow a link, go to the last/first page) within the document, the page you come from is stored. This in-document history is accessible via I, to jump back to the most recent page simply press Backspace (or the Back button on Android).

One of the activities easy to perform with a touchscreen is drawing. That's why I implemented reading and writing support for ink annotations first. Since version 0.8 flatboat also supports Text annotations, i.e. those with an icon, which pop up, if you click on them. FreeText annotations (text visible without user interaction) will probably follow with one of the next releases.

The current version is 0.8.31 (for Android 0.8.32), released on January 2, 2012, see the changelog .

source code: gitlab .
Maemo 5 (N900) (normally): via extras-devel .
Maemo 5 (N900) while garage is in read-only mode: look here .
Meego harmattan (N9/950): look here .
Android: download this or the E-Ink version (both require Ministro(Qt libs), which occupies about 25MB).
OS X: get that one .
Ubuntu: there's a PPA .
Windows: download this and extract it.

There are two (now mostly unmaintained) support threads: one on talk.maemo.org and one on mobilread.com . Use the comment box below to post bugs.

PS: The name is a (stupid) anagram of “portable document format”.

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