AZARDI 8.1 Released

An update has been released for AZARDI. This is a small feature upgrade and bugfix release. The full version is available from the AZARDI site. If you have AZARDI 7 or 8 installed this will update automatically next time you open the reader.

We have also included a 64bit deb package version for Linux in this release.

The new features are:

New ePub3 Features in AZARDI 8.1

Landmarks. If your ePub 3 uses landmarks these can be displayed with the new Landmarks button. The newly announced test books have landmarks.

Page Nav. If your ePub 3 uses page navigation this can be displayed with the new Landmarks button and select the Page Navigation option. There is no demo book yet. This will be added to AZARDI Resources shortly.

New General Features in AZARDI 8.1

• Drag and Drop ePub Upload. You can now drag and drop multiple ePubs into AZARDI in a single action from the Add Multi-Books option.
• Library Table View. Presentation improved and it now has Date Added. All columns sort and can be turned on and off. Table now has alternate row shading in all operating systems.
• Page Navigation. You can now navigate pages with Left-Right arrows and PgUp / PgDn keyboard buttons
• Section Navigation. You can now navigate document sections with Shift-Left Arrow, Shift-Right-Arrow, and Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDn buttons.
• Image Viewer. You can now click on any image and it will open in a new image viewer window. You can zoom the image using the mouse center scroll key, and drag the image around in the viewport. 
• Covers. If cover images are available in an ePub3 they can be viewed from a fixed link in the Tables of Content.
• Multi-language Hyphenation. If your ePub is correctly declaring the language in the XHTML file, language specific hyphenation will be applied if CSS -moz-hyphens: auto; is applied.
• AZARDI Interactive Engine. Now supports QAA-Set, Flashcards, Interactive Tutorials and other numerous bug-fixes and improvements.
• Bug-fixes. Numerous bug-fixes and clean-ups. RTL content now displays aligned correctly in Contents. All viewport windows now close in Linux. 

That's it. The Drag and Drop upload is particularly nice for those who have a lot of ePubs or do frequent checking. I have uploaded 50 and it went OK on my Window 7 machine. There is no limit to how many books you can upload. It's a common sense interface. Dropping 1000 books in may take some time to process. It may not process at all! AZARDI has to open each ePub, extract the metadata, read the manifest, find the cover file and generate a thumbnail for each ePub.

Page Nav is an interestingly useful feature. We have used Page Nav in a number of text books already. In the classroom this allows the teachers request to "turn to page xx" to be addressed by both the poor print book kids  and the flashy e-book kids.

It's three clicks to get to any page in AZARDI. Landmarks/Page Nav/Page Number. Page number markers are available on the edge of the page as well.

We are possibly going to add a hide-show page breaks feature in the next release. The problem with this is the exact grammar is not defined in the spec so this would only be available from IGP:FoundationXHTML tagged books.

Get and enjoy AZARDI. The worlds first (and best) ePub 3 reader.

Posted by Richard Pipe