Incomplete book pages

(15 Jul 2012 10:23 AM)J.S.Egan Wrote:  frogplate is sort-of right - it is to do with memory; but it is also going to be caused by specific books.

I will try to explain!

Ebooks don't have "pages - each chapter / section in a book is actually just one "page" - a bit like an ancient Egyptian scroll - and the Kindle's screen is like a "window" on a particular section of the scroll.

In an idea world, the Kindle would load the entire book into memory, and then just move the window around, as you pressed the page buttons.

However, this would require a lot of memory and books would be very slow to open, especially as it has to take into account that some books (anthologies) have thousands of pages.

So what it does is locate the "window" in the scroll and print just the window to the screen, so that only that "window" is loaded into memory - a few hundred words at most.

However, these is a problem with this - sometimes the formatting overlaps the "window" - e.g. some italic text starts on the page BEFORE and ends on the page AFTER the current "window". So although all the text in the "window" should be italic, there is no instruction on that particular page to say "do this in italics".

Because of these circumstances, the Kindle knows that it has to go back a bit (and forward a bit) so that it actually loads a bit more than the current screen into memory. This is where things start to go wrong. If the italics begin on the immediate page before then that is going to be fine, but some of the more obscure processing instructions might begin several pages before, and so they can get 'lost' because it hasn't got enough memory to go all that far back.

In the worst-case scenario, which we are seeing here, the missing formatting actually causes the Kindle's "renderer" (the thing that writes the text to the screen) to crash.

(The reason is fails going "page forward" but works if you go forward again, and then click "back" is that you have a slightly different portion of "scroll" in memory at that point, thus avoiding the crash.)

(15 Jul 2012 10:23 AM)J.S.Egan Wrote:  frogplate is sort-of right - it is to do with memory; but it is also going to be caused by specific books.