Developer: Jim Chapman

Freda is a free program for reading electronic books (ebooks) on Windows Mobile devices.

Freda Features:

* Compatible with Windows Mobile versions 5 and 6
* Reads ePub (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books
* Touch screen interface
* Works with all screen dimensions and orientations
* Customisable fonts and colours

Opening and Reading Books Opening a book

When started, Freda will display an initial 'splash' screen. To open a book, tap anywhere on the screen to open the Freda main menu.

From this menu, select the 'Library' option, which will display the list of ebooks currently in your library folder (by default, \My Documents\Freda ebooks\). The library screen allows you to view your books either as a detail list (one row per book, with title, author, filename etc. shown in various columns) or as icons. You can switch between these two views by using the 'View books as' control at the top of the screen. Tap to select the book you wish to open, and then tap on the OK soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen. Freda will now load and paginate the book; during this process the program will show a grey screen with an animation. When the book is ready, Freda will display the first page (or in the case of a book that you have previously been reading, the last page you read).

Reading a book

To move to the next page of the book, you can do any of:

1. press the right or down buttons on your device's key-pad/D-pad (if present)
2. tap the right soft-key button on the screen, labelled '>>' (if visible; if you have put Freda into 'full-screen' mode, this control will not be visible - see Full Screen Mode)
3. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if flicking the page upwards, towards the top of the screen
4. press-and-hold the screen with your finger, then drag your finger upwards, towards the top of the screen

To move to the previous page of the book:

1. press the left or up buttons on your device's key-pad/D-pad (if present)
2. tap the left soft-key button on the screen, labelled '<<' (if visible; if you have put Freda into 'full-screen' mode, this control will not be visible - see Full Screen Mode)
3. flick the screen with your finger-tip, as if flicking the page downwards, towards the bottom of the screen
4. press-and-hold the screen with your finger, then drag your finger downwards, towards the bottom of the screen

When moving to another page, Freda displays a 'scrolling' animation. If this is not desired, you can switch it off using the 'Settings – Appearance' screen.

While reading, you may encounter a page that Freda has not yet loaded or paginated. In this case, you will see the grey screen with the loading/paginating animation, while Freda prepares the page for you.

Adding books to your library

Freda's library of books consists simply of all books in the folder '\My Documents\Freda ebooks' on the device (note: you can change this location using Settings). If you have a book file on your PC, you can add it to Freda's library by using ActiveSync to copy the file into that folder. Alternatively, if you have found a book on the internet, you can download it directly into that folder by using your device's web-browser.

Chapters and the loading of books

ePub books are broken into chapters, and Freda takes advantage of this when loading books, by quickly loading whichever chapter you need to see, and putting it on-screen just as soon as it is ready. The program will carry on with loading all the other chapters as a 'background' task. If you have enabled the on-screen display of page numbers (see Settings - Appearance), you can see this because, until the book is fully loaded, the page number will be unavailable and a 'Paginating' message will be displayed instead.

In the case of very large books, Freda may be unable to hold all chapters in memory at the same time. In this case, Freda will stop loading chapters, and will load/unload chapters on demand, so that you can always read the current chapter, but some earlier or later chapters will not be held in memory. In this case, you will see the 'Paginating' message permanently, and some features (such as 'Find' and 'Go To Page' will be unavailable.

Although TXT book files are not broken into separate chapters, Freda internally treats them as if they were, to give better flexibility around loading and paginating them. Broadly speaking, Freda splits the TXT file into chunks of 1,000 lines, and treats each chunk as a separate chapter.

Working with Books

Go…

The Freda main menu (accessed by tapping on the screen) includes an item 'Go …', which can be used to navigate to other parts of the currently open book. The items on the menu are as follows:

Go Back: returns to the place you were before your last 'Go ...' operation.

Go To Page: brings up a screen with a slider control that you can use to select the page number to move to, and a list of all available chapter names/numbers.

Go to (chapter): allows you to jump directly to the start of any chapter in the book.

Some of these options may be inaccessible ('greyed out') at any given time. For instance: 'Go Back' is unavailable if no 'Go...' operations have yet been performed, and the 'Go To Page' slider for page selection will not be available until all chapters of the book have been paginated (because until this has been done, we do not know what the pages' numbers are).

Find

The Freda main menu includes a 'find' option, to allow you to search for occurrences of a word in the book. If the option is 'greyed out' it means that the book is not yet fully loaded.

If you accessed the main menu by tapping on a word, the 'find' option will search for the next occurrence of that word.

If you tapped on a blank area of screen to bring up the menu, the 'find' option will present a screen for you to enter the text you wish to search for, and an option to set the search direction (forward or backward). If Freda finds the search text, it will switch to the page containing it, highlighting the first word containing the search text (to search again, tap on that word and pick the 'find' option). If Freda reaches the end of the book without finding the search text, it will display a message box to this effect; tap on the message box's 'OK' button to clear the message off the screen.

Links/Hrefs

Words within ePub and HTML books may be links ('hrefs') to another point within the book. Such words are, by default, displayed in blue. Tapping on a link word will 'go to' the link target. This will only work if that target points to a page that is already loaded, so you may get inconsistent results when following links in a book that is still loading.

To return from following a link, use the 'Go... > Go Back' menu option.

Settings and Advanced Features

Full Screen Mode

The main Freda menu contains an item to switch between 'Windowed' mode and 'Full Screen' mode. In 'Windowed' mode, the application title bar appears across the top of the screen and the soft-key buttons along the bottom. In 'Full Screen' mode, these elements are removed, and the whole of the screen is available for displaying book text.

When you switch modes, you will see the 'Paginating' animation for a few seconds, while Freda repaginates the text to account for the change in the amount of screen space available for displaying text.

Settings:

The 'Settings' option on the main menu will display a multi-tabbed screen, with tabs containing various screens on which you can adjust font face, size and colour, folders, appearance and various advanced settings. Tap on the ‘tab’ labels along the bottom of the window to move between these screens. When done, you can save your settings and return to the main reader screen by tapping on the OK soft-key button at the bottom left of the screen. Or to abandon your changes, tap on the Cancel button on the bottom right.

Upon returning to the main reader screen, you may see the 'Paginating' screen for a few seconds, if you have made a change that affects the size of displayed words (font size, for example).

Settings - Fonts and Colours

The first two 'Settings' tabs allow you to adjust font face, size and colour.

The font tab is self-explanatory. It will display all the fonts faces availble on your device, and a range of plausible font sizes.

The colour tab provides three buttons, respectively allowing you to adjust the foreground text colour, the background (paper) colour and the link (href) colour. Clicking on these buttons will bring up the standard Windows Mobile 'Color Dialog', which allows you to select a new colour for the chosen element. Note the behaviour of this dialog:

First: tap on the coloured square to select a colour

Then: tap on the 'ok' label in the title bar of the 'Color Dialog'.

Settings - Folders

This tab allows you to customise the folders used by Freda (useful if, for example, you wish to keep your files on a storage card). Two folder locations are customisable:

Library Folder: controls where Freda will look for ebooks (by default, it looks just in the selected folder, but if you prefer it can scan that directory and all subdirectories. See Settings - Advanced. Note that Freda does not create these folders for you, and it does not move any files.

Temp Working Folder: specifies where Freda will keep its temporary working files – for example, the html files that are produced by unzipping an ePub archive. Freda never purges these files (though you can do so manually, see Settings - Advanced) so you should pick a location where you know there is plenty of free storage space.

To change one of these folders, tap on the corresponding 'Change' button. A tree view will be displayed, which you can use to specify the chosen directory location. When you have selected the folder you want to use, return to the main Settings screen by tapping the OK soft-key button at the bottom left.

Settings - Appearance

On this tab you can enable or disable the scrolling animation and the display of page number at the bottom of the page.

Settings - Advanced

Options on this tab allow you to:

Search Subfolders in Library: change the behaviour of the 'library' screen so that, in addition to searching the library folder, it also searches all its subfolders. Take care – if there are many files and folders under the library folder, it will mean that opening the library takes several minutes.

Clear Temporary Files: delete everything in Freda’s temporary folder (where it keeps its working files). Take care – Freda just deletes everything in the directory; it does not make any effort to work out whether any particular file belongs to it. As long as you stick with the default setting (\Program Files\Freda\Temp) this will not be a problem

Clear Bookshelf: forget all information about what books have previously been loaded (i.e. thumbnail images, last-opened page, etc.). This function does not delete any ebook files.

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