Secrets of the Cool Reader program. Reading aloud

File Browser Settings Tap Menu/Settings in the File Browser to change some settings. You can change the sort order and switch the mode of displaying books in lists - normal or abbreviated (file name only). You can use two viewing modes:

Initial site settings Once the site control panel has become available, you can perform the initial settings (Fig. 2.9). Rice. 2.9. Site control panelStep 1. Fill in the field with the name of the site. As we agreed, our site will be called “My Recipes”. Your

As a rule, programs for reading text have two main requirements: a large number of supported formats and ease of reading.

Average rating on Google Play: 4.5, size: 3.58 MB. I must say, the first requirement Cool Reader answers completely: this application supports formats such as fb2, epub, txt, doc, rtf, html, chm, tcr, pdb, prc, mobi and pml, which allows you to view books practically all formats that you can find. At the same time it requires Android version higher than 1.5– Almost all modern devices fall under this requirement. And, what is important - Cool Reader is completely free and even does not contain advertising, so we were obliged to take a closer look at it.

Appearance and interface

Main menu looks like very nice due to the images of the covers of the last opened books. At the same time, for the book you read last, the the time it was last opened, and the percentage at which you stopped. You can also open the device’s file system from the main menu, or use a convenient search: the program automatically sorts your saved books by author, series, rating, and also allows you to mark currently read and read books.

Separate the advantage is the possibility fast access To network libraries directly from the application, without having to go to the browser and download books. The library will be especially interesting for Russian-speaking users LitRes.

The appearance in view mode depends on screen size: on phones the text takes up all space, and the menu opens by clicking on the center of the screen, on tablets there is a very small side panel, and tapping on the screen opens it. At the same time the font and background texture are very pleasing to the eye, unlike a number of similar applications, the eyes simply get tired when used for a long time.

So, let's look at what tools available to view text:

1. View content with the possibility of quick transition;

2. Search by text case sensitive or insensitive;

3. Settings menu, which will be discussed in more detail a little

4. View and adding bookmarks;

5. Return button to the main menu;

6. Turn on night mode;

7. Mode highlighting text;

8. Transition to specific page or by a percentage position from the beginning of the book;

9. Reading the text out loud.

Even just listing the features is already impressive, but the main advantage Cool Reader before competitors is located in the settings menu.

Settings

And the setting in Cool Reader Almost everything lends itself. The program provides this: many changeable parameters, that they are divided into as many as 5 sections. In the first two tabs, the user can change the font to one of 19 preset ones, adjust the font size and boldness, and also fine-tune the CSS for various paragraphs (for example, highlight quotations or footnotes in a special way).

The third section of the settings menu allows configure the interface type: page orientation, text and background color, paging animation, padding and a number of other parameters. Other elements can also be customized, for example, controls: you can appoint various actions for clicking on different parts of the screen, buttons and so on.

Summarizing

Cool Reader – an excellent “reader”, which offers quite a lot of features and supported readable file formats for its size, especially considering its free. It is important to note, that not every paid application allows you to fine-tune it “for yourself”. These advantages were also appreciated by users: the number of downloads has long since crossed the line 10 million.

For Android OS. This time we will talk about readers, or, as they are also called, “readers”, and we will start with the most popular applications for e-books.

As you know, the popularity of “readers”, and other programs, is due to several factors. First of all, it is free, stable, omnivorous formats and a friendly interface. It is also encouraging that such programs are needed and are popular. Our people love to read, and not necessarily for work.

The hero of this review will be one of the most famous reading programs – Cool Reader. This application is known to many and has been around for quite a long time, but this does not mean that it has not undergone changes over time. Some users liked the innovations, while others hastened to abandon them, returning to the previous version.

We will try to figure out whether Cool Reader is really good or whether it is more often installed because of its popularity and recommendations. What pitfalls does this multifunctional reader contain?

Cool Reader

Acquaintance

This is one of the most “ancient” readers, which is known to many. Interestingly, the program is thought out to the smallest detail and has undergone many updates. It is distinguished by a minimalistic interface, omnivorous formats, the ability to read books aloud, and direct work with zip archives. At the same time, Cool Reader is absolutely free, but for those who want to support the project, there is a special offer that does not oblige you to anything. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, but let’s start with the dry facts reported by developer Vadim Lopatin.

Main features:

• Full FB2 support: CSS styles, tables, footnotes at the bottom of the page;
• Setting fonts, colors, line spacing, indents, hyphens;
• Page turning animation;
• Dictionary support (ColorDict, GoldenDict, Fora Dictionary, Aard Dictionary);
• Customizable actions for touch screen buttons and zones;
• Day and night profiles (two sets of settings for colors, background, backlight brightness);
• Bookmarks, table of contents, text search;
• Bookmarks on a piece of text (quotes, comments, corrections);
• Export bookmarks to a text file;
• Advanced styling customization using CSS;
• Built-in file browser;
• Convenient list of recent books;
• Support for online book directories (OPDS), for example, flibusta, lib.ololo.cc;
• Access to the LitRes e-book store;
• Reading books from a zip archive.

Beginning of work

After opening Cool Reader, the first thing we see is the question of whether we need on-screen buttons when reading (that is, the “Menu” button is not available, and you can call it while viewing a document by short pressing the center of the screen).

For some, such information will seem superfluous (“otherwise we don’t know without you”), while those who don’t know, without it, will torment the screen for a long time in search of the “menu”. Both will be satisfied, since the window about choosing a buttonless mode appears only when you first start the program, and there, as they say, “we warned you.” We really liked this care for users. However, when testing, the toolbar is needed like air, so we’ll leave it there.

So we're on the start screen. Everything is very clear here. On the “parquet” background there is a list where you can see the latest opened files, as well as open books from the file system or network sources (you can add one or use the LitRes Internet portal). Here you can also search for a book by author, title, series and rating.

It is also possible to search by tags made by the user earlier. There are three points for this: “to read”, “reading”, “read”.

By the way, in the upper right corner there is an inconspicuous button that opens an additional menu. The first item is the traditional “About the program”, where in addition to indicating its version, links to the official website and license agreement, there is a tab in the form of an emoticon, after clicking which opens a charitable foundation. Here you can buy yourself various regalia (coins), that is, support the developers financially.

This does not mean that the Gold version will have more features. You will simply be assigned the appropriate status in the program. In other words, you will buy something like a gift from Odnoklassniki, be happy, the developers will get their jackpot, and Cool Reader will still remain free for everyone.

A fairly noble approach, which, by the way, motivates honest people. We will not rewrite the prices - everything is shown in the screenshot above.

We return to the beginning, click the inconspicuous button again and see five more items: “Open Book”, “Recent Books”, “User Guide”, “Settings” and “Exit”.

Everything is clear with the first two, but the user manual pleasantly surprised us. 25 sheets contain detailed instructions on “what, where, why and why” in this reader. If we suddenly missed something in this article, then it can always be found there. Therefore, we will not go into details, but will go straight to the settings.

basic settings

This is a typical list. At the beginning, we are asked to select the basic sorting of books: by author, by file name (descending), by author (descending), by title (descending), by file time (descending).

Next, you can check the box if you want a simple list of files or check the item responsible for displaying/not displaying the cover in the list of books. If necessary, select the cover size. By default it is medium. In general, sorting for every color and taste.

In addition, you can enable or disable scanning the properties of books in a directory. This is necessary if you do not need the program to sort books, but to display everything as is. An excellent solution for those who love “creative chaos”. If you need to see only text files, feel free to check the box next to “hide directories without books.”

We skip choosing the interface language and move on to plugins. Initially, the LitRes Internet portal plugin is used, which in principle is sufficient, but if it is not enough for you, you can always load the necessary one. Just below you can enable full screen and night mode, which allows you to adapt the screen for comfortable reading in the dark. The substrate takes on a grainy brownish tint, and the screen itself seems to dim, making page viewing pleasing to the eye. However, not everyone is happy with this, but this will be discussed below, in the “Disadvantages and Bugs” section.

We've sorted out the basic settings, but the most interesting thing is hidden in the depths of the program, when we open the treasured book.

Book reading

For the main test, we will use a Google Nexus 10 tablet and a randomly selected book with a funny title and deep meaning in fb2 format. So that the reader, and ourselves, could understand whether the program is capable of opening all the declared formats, as well as adequately displaying them, various works were downloaded in epub, doc, rtf, html, mobi, cbr (comics), pdf and djvu formats.

Open the book (fb2), swipe your finger across the screen from right to left. You can just short tap anywhere on the screen to scroll forward. To go back, just tap the upper left corner.

The page started moving and slowed down, although the next ones went like clockwork. We waited about five minutes and the same thing. It seems that the “reader” goes into sleep mode when idle and is in no hurry to wake up immediately, although the Google Nexus 10 cannot be called a “weak” device. Perhaps it's in the file? So it weighs a ridiculous 881 KB.

Okay, let’s try to “play” with other formats, and for clarity, let’s draw a pivot table.

So what do we get? Books and magazines in pdf, djvu and cbr formats not only did not open or crashed - the file manager simply did not see them.

As for other formats, their support can be given a solid “four”. The program does not crash, opens files almost instantly and does not slow down when scrolling. There is a slight hesitation when opening the first few pages, but then everything is fine, as is the case with the basic fb2. Peak RAM load was observed only when loading .rtf and .html, which is not surprising.

In principle, for two gigabytes of RAM in our device, this factor is nothing, but on weaker smartphones and tablets (especially older ones, where the RAM is no more than 512 MB), the application grabs a significant “piece of the performance pie”. And the whole point is a bunch of settings and add-ons that most users don’t need. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, because soon you will understand everything yourself.

Let's pay attention to the left side of the screen, where the “hot keys” await us. So, from top to bottom, in order: “Go back”, “Contents”, “Search” (possible case-sensitive and backward search), “Reading settings” (we’ll return to them a little later), “Bookmarks”, “Home”, “ Night mode”, “Selecting text” (so that when scrolling, you don’t accidentally select it), “Page by page”, “Skip through text in percentage equivalent”, “Open file” and “Read aloud”.

The last parameter, as you might guess, allows you to listen to a book. A female voice monotonously read the text, and at this time the spoken fragment was displayed in highlight, by the way, in Russian. In principle, such a solution is tolerable, but, as they say, it’s not for everybody. The settings for “Matilda” (the voice is too similar to the robot from WASP) are standard: play, stop, pause, fast forward/rewind, volume, playback speed.

Since we are talking about isolating the test, everything is simple here. Click on the “hands” icon and move your finger, like a mouse in Word, across the screen (the selection scheme, by the way, is similar to the office program). At the same time, a small “menu” appears at the bottom, where the eye is immediately attracted by two “sliders”. This is nothing more than “precise text selection,” that is, you can select either words step by step or from the end of a paragraph.

Well, it's quite convenient, especially if you want to copy a single phrase or application.

Above the sliders are six function keys. The first copies the selection, the second allows you to translate a fragment, but for this you need to install the Fora dictionary. This can be done in the advanced settings, but be patient, as these options will be discussed in a separate conversation.

Next comes the “Favorites” button, after pressing which a new window appears. Here you can make a bookmark, comment on the selected text, or change it altogether (your choice). We didn’t try to be clever, but simply multiplied the letter “s” in place of the efforts of the English writer, and also wrote an equally stupid comment.

Now, to see a separately selected fragment and our work on the text, just click on the checkmark in the upper right corner. The window will close, the text will be highlighted in green, go to the “bookmarks” and see our creation. Convenient and understandable.

Click on the highlighted one, and a menu opens at the top, where there are all the above-described keys with a description of their meaning. The exception is “Auto scrolling”, the meaning of which should be clear to you. The page change speed can be adjusted by tapping in the lower left and right corners. By the way, to call the extended menu, you do not need to select and save a fragment to bookmarks. In the left “quick menu” under the icons at the very bottom there is a special “arrow” for this.

To understand why the other keys above the “sliders” are used, select the text, find the letter icon with a plus sign and press. A small window pops up that allows you to send the selected fragment to a “quick notepad” (we have it installed separately), via Bluetooth, SMS/MMS message, or using Google services: Gmail, Google+. And if you have the Facebook service installed, the corresponding icon will appear.

As you can see, the application uses all available communication tools installed on the device. This is very convenient and you don’t have to come up with a status on social networks. Next comes the “search” in the fragment and the button to exit the selection.

Advanced settings (text and reading settings)

Font settings

Go to the “Settings” button (or tap the center of the screen twice). So, we have the first tab: “Font”.

Here you can change the font itself (there are eight preset fonts in total), its size (from 39 to 170) and check the box next to “boldness”. If necessary, it is possible to smooth the text or select line spacing. Here we select the hyphenation dictionary according to the rules of the required language (17 countries in total) and enable/disable “dangling punctuation”.

Dangling punctuation (protrusion) is the hanging of some punctuation symbols (hyphens, quotation marks, parentheses, commas, etc.) outside the text boundary. Designed to optically align text borders: punctuation marks have less visual weight, so hanging them down will make the text border appear smoother. We are sure that the text is much more convenient to read with this option, although it’s up to you (below are two examples with dangling punctuation enabled and disabled).

We think that everything is clear here, but just in case, we’ll take two screenshots: with and without kerning. As you can see, there is almost no difference, but Cool Reader is aimed not only at a wide mass of readers, but also at picky fans of journalism, and true fans of reading will only appreciate these settings.

Let's move on to scaling the images. There is nothing complicated here either. Regular pictures and inline pictures (that is, those that are in the body of an online book) can be scaled automatically or enlarged by an integer number of times. Gamma correction of the font and minimum spacing width are designed to make the page more comfortable to display, namely, if you are not satisfied with the sharpness and spacing between words.

Font hinting is used to provide clearer letterforms on devices with low screen resolutions or when displaying text in small font sizes. Well, the tab is completed by additional fonts, of which there are eight, just like the main ones. They serve to replace a missing character in basic fonts.

In general, the set of tools for working with fonts is more than impressive and should satisfy the most demanding user. Everything is fine, let's move on.

Style settings

Tap on tab number two – CSS (design styles). Leave the checkbox next to “Allow inline document styles” or remove it. This option is configured for each document separately. And then begins the flooded sea for everyone who wants to make the text purely individual.

There is no point in talking about each tab. For example, only the Default Paragraph Format section contains text alignment, first line indentation and typeface, font size, weight, font style, as well as line spacing, underlining, superscripts, and subscripts. There you can also find the text color and indentation before, after, left and right. To be honest, we see no point in turning the reader into a tool for the layout designer, but there will be those who want to argue with us.

The same can be done with the title and subtitle, preformatted text, links, quotations, epigraphs, verses, text author names, footnotes, links and footnote titles, and annotations. In general, these CSS/style settings for the “reader” are more than enough.

Appearance Settings

But the next tab contains completely different settings - the appearance of the document as a whole. The “Full screen” option, according to the developers, does not work on the third and fourth versions of Android, in this case everything is full screen. Although, after experimenting with this button, we noticed that the screen was slightly larger, and the top information field in Android 4.3 (charging, network, etc.) disappeared.

Next comes the selection of the location of the toolbar (aka “hot keys”), that is, it can be installed along the short/long edge, placed on top, bottom, left, right, or completely removed (the last option for those who did not do this the first time starting the program). We chose the location below. You can also check the box next to “Hide the toolbar in full screen mode.”

If necessary, you can select the page display mode: as is and “scroll” (scroll not from right to left, but from top to bottom). Next, we set the page orientation: portrait, landscape, portrait (180 degrees), landscape (270 degrees) and depending on the location of the sensor. By the way, having tried to turn the book upside down, nothing changed, that is, the book position remained portrait, and the landscape position remained landscape. Maybe this has something to do with our gadget, although in any case these functions are rarely used, so if this is a bug, it’s a minor one.

But it’s worth choosing the two-page viewing mode, as it looks more like a book. We talked about the night mode, but we’ll talk about how it works, or rather how it doesn’t quite work, below.

We move on to the color of the text and background, where we are offered to try ourselves as a colorist, since the shade of the color that we chose earlier can be changed up to its marking (which, by the way, is indicated). Again, a solution for aesthetes. However, that's not all. You can also change the background texture to wood, parchment, factory, metal, and the like.

Next we change the header and footer. You can change the font size and font itself, and also choose the text color. If necessary, turn on/off the book title, page number, number of pages, percentage read, chapter marks, set the battery charge in percentage terms, or disable the header and footer altogether. If footnotes on pages get in the way, then we remove them too.

Let's move on to the paging animation. You can turn it off completely, select a shift of one or two pages, and also enable the flipping effect (flipping). The latter does not look very realistic, but tolerable.

You can choose to highlight bookmarks: by background color or underline. We don't need bookmarks, so we disabled them. And the book design selection tab ends with the choice of highlight, comment and correction colors, as well as adjusting the left, right, top and bottom indents. In theory, everything is clear here.

Control Settings

So, buttons. You can customize them however you like. For example, the standard action of the “Menu” key (reading menu) can be changed to lock the screen, enable it to select text, switch the screen orientation, and generally assign everything that can be controlled in the program to it.

That is, the Cool Reader interface can be changed beyond recognition, and subsequently only you and no one else will be able to use the program, because the usual keys will work completely differently. A sort of ego version of the application. There is no point in describing what can be put on a particular key at all, since almost everything can be put on. Go ahead.

The same thing happens with the touchscreen, which is divided into nine active zones, each of which is customizable. For example, select the upper left corner, where the “Previous page/back” action is located by default. Click on it and select: forward/backward 10 pages, first/last page, next/previous chapter, and so on.

It turns out that all the control steps described above are just ephemeral standard settings that you can change, and then write to us that we described the controls incorrectly.

If necessary, you can change the additional action from a long press to two short ones. This action is precisely the call of the menu directly from the book, which is carried out by a long tap in the center of the screen. In addition, you can safely check the boxes next to: selecting text by double-clicking, turning pages using the volume buttons on the gadget, highlighting a screen area when pressed, or disabling the trackball altogether.

If you are not satisfied with controlling the brightness by swiping on the left edge, please change it to the right edge or completely disable this function. Don't like swiping? Uncheck the box and scroll only with the mechanical buttons of the device. Even the action when selected can be changed to activate the control panel, copy, search in the dictionary, add a bookmark and simple text search.

Almost the same thing can be configured for selecting several words, and if you wish, you can enable the option “Do not reset the selection after closing the dictionary.”

basic settings

We will not repeat ourselves and describe all the items on this tab, as this has been done previously. Let us note only those that are missing there, namely the “dictionary”. As we mentioned earlier, when we talked about the function keys that appear when text is selected, the Fora dictionary needs to be loaded independently, and this is done here.

As you can see from the screenshot, this is not the only reference book available in this program. But how to install it? Unfortunately, it is impossible to do this directly from the program, but you need to find the dictionary yourself, download it and copy it to the .dict folder in the root of the program. And if you want to return the default settings, you need to enter the .cr3 folder and delete all .ini files. The most interesting thing is that support is provided only through email, and the project page itself is located on, where everything is in English.

It wasn't difficult for us to figure it out, but it's quite annoying to waste time on. But what about the average user? In our opinion, product support, a simple reset of settings and loading of dictionaries are not so difficult to implement. But the beta project Cool Reader GL has been implemented (we’ll talk about it a little later), which, apparently, will replace all the previous ones, but they don’t get around to this version. Otherwise, this tab no longer contains anything new, except perhaps the ability to turn off the button backlighting and remove icons in the settings.

Disadvantages and bugs

When testing on a Google Nexus 10 tablet, we found a bug: in the process of experimenting with the settings on the main screen, the directories of our file system disappeared, that is, it was not possible to open a book from the SD card. Manipulating the checkboxes that are responsible for working with directories did not lead to anything. After restarting the application, everything returned to its place.

However, we noticed that when we check the box for night mode, our flash drive magically disappears. We uncheck the box and nothing returns. There is also a comment on Google Play that literally says the following: “...a very unstable application. After turning off the tablet and turning it on, my settings and bookmarks disappear, I have to configure them again. If you can, please eliminate it. It’s a great app, I really like it, but for now I’m giving it a 4.”. By the way, you can read similar reviews further, but this bug affects not only tablets. An annoying drawback, considering the rich functionality of Cool Reader. True, we did not experience any problems with saving settings - only with directories.

Regarding the night mode, we can agree with the comment: “ ...invert the background to black: the black background is not completely black. I don’t know where you got this backing, but it’s not uniform, it’s spotty, this is especially noticeable on the screen of the laptop 3, which is black.”. In principle, we were quite happy with the soft brownish tint, except for the graininess. For those who want the perfect black color, we have found a solution: choose a dark design, turn on the night mode and you will be happy. Apparently, developers and users see the background differently for comfortable reading in the dark.

• Fixed support for .mobi format;
• Additional font sizes included;
• Improved support for OPDS online directories - https, username and password, ORobot TOR proxy can be used for .onion sites;
• The sizes of the toolbar and menu have been optimized;
• Improved performance.

Conclusions on Cool Reader

Cool Reader is a fairly versatile and controversial project that occupies a leading position on Google Play. On the one hand, this is a convenient multifunctional “reader”, on the other hand, it is a damp (yes, damp) product that constantly has to be corrected. As a result, having pleased some, the developer upsets others. It is clear that it is impossible to please everyone, however, having implemented almost complete independent customization of both the book being read and the program interface itself, the developer posted a dry manual for working with it, forgetting to build in the option to reset the default settings.

However, you should not judge this popular program too harshly, since it is absolutely free and copes with its main function as a “reader” at a professional level. It’s actually not that difficult to get used to, and once you’ve configured everything for yourself, you won’t want to part with Cool Reader.

So, let’s go through the points: the “reader” should be free (it is), support a bunch of formats (alas, not all), be easy to use and manage (a stretch of the imagination) and stable (alas). Let's try to look at another program by Vadim Lopatin - Cool Reader GL, which is also free. Maybe this time the app creator has outdone himself?

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