Made a LOT of progress on the device’s usability!

First and foremost, as you can see from the images, I updated all the fonts. While yes, I would agree that Iosevka is not a great e-ink reading font, it makes for a good UI monospaced font. I also updated the font to Atkinson Hyperlegible which looks absolutely amazing. Just take a look at it yourself! I removed font sideloading so this is the forced font for all epubs. Learned a bit about font kerning and it looks pretty well-spaced now.

Secondly, the UI is a bit outdated but I got rid of even more book-related settings. Now it shows you the chapters in the book menu without any additional button presses! I am still keeping the options for landscape/horizontal mode (which also now inverts the button controls!)

Speaking of button controls, the top power button is now the action key! This is how you select a book, open the quick menu or select a chapter. It doubles as the power button when you hold it! This makes landscape reading MUCH more effective, which is a big goal of this firmware!

I went into the SD card and realized a few things. First, the epub books on the device are completely unnecessary. They are never really read from because the converted book binaries really never needed to reference them again. So now the binary book format includes everything that the epub had, and you dont need to have epubs on the device anymore - just run a script with a bunch of books and it’ll be put on the sd card automatically! This saves a lot of space and is better organized because books are now stored in folders with their images and data instead of an invisible cache folder.

Speaking of the cache folder, I made numerous improvements starting from a dramatic settings simplification going from 5 extra files to none! It’s just book positions, the persisted book settings (just the font size, orientation, and last read book!) and that’s it. It is super nice and simple now and I deduped a lot of settings that should’ve been in RAM.

I got rid of the book convert thing on the device, because now it runs on your computer! It realllly doesn’t make any sense to run computationally expensive operations on an ESP32… this is a much better way.

In terms of the UI, I got rid of the glyphs, icons, labels, hyperlinks, progress bars and dropped any of the other fonts on the device like Literata and Inter. There were also a lot of bug fixes, like making the screen actually show the book cover on sleep and opening the proper book on unsleep, at the right position. And a big one: I got rid of QEMU because I didnt really use it or need it, and it kinda bloated the codebase. That’s pretty much it!!!