# QRead Documentation

### Last Updated: Friday January 11, 2019

## Introduction

QRead is an innovative and powerful eText reader for the Windows platform. Perfect for students, professionals, and casual readers alike, QRead provides access to a multitude of various e-book formats with support for bookmarking, searching, and more all in a convenient and intuitive tabbed interface.

## Supported file formats

QRead supports many of the most common e-book file formats.:

- PDF, which most textbooks are distributed in by their publishers', is fully supported with a superior PDF parsing library which makes QRead one of the most accurate PDF readers available to the blind user.
- Unprotected EPub, another common format used in digital publishing, is also fully supported.
- QRead handles bookshare content, both compressed and uncompressed. If the Bookshare file is compressed, you will be prompted to enter your password when opening the book.
- Microsoft Word 2007 DOCX documents are supported, though at this time QRead does not support .doc files created with earlier versions of Word. This support is planned for a later release.
- Microsoft Compiled Help files, typically ending with the extension .chm, are also supported, making reading long manuals a snap.
- Some legacy ebooks are still distributed as a large HTML file, which QRead will happily read.
- Finally, QRead supports the universal formats of ascii or UTF-8 encoded text.

## Bookmarking

One of the most vexing problems when dealing with ebooks is managing bookmarks. Many formats cannot be directly modified, making them virtually unbookmarkable. HTML files and other such documents which utilize a virtual buffer /virtual PC cursor/other screen reader abstraction do not typically maintain their place between runs of the browser or computer unless some specific key combination is pressed. Text documents and other such editable files can be modified, with text like bookmark1, bookmark2, etc. being inserted but this is hardly an optimal solution. QRead sets out to solve this problem in a couple of ways. The first and most exciting of these is automatic bookmarking. As you are reading, every second or so, your place in the book is recorded. This means that when you close QRead and re-open it, your place in your book is automatically preserved. This holds true for however you happen to close QRead, be that the application closing normally, your computer restarting, or even a crash. Let me let that sink in just for a moment. You don't ever need to lose your place in a book ever again. Along with its autobookmark support, QRead also lets you drop a single temporary bookmark wherever you want in the active book with control+b. To Jump back to this or any other bookmark at any time, press control+j and select it. It is also possible to set as many named bookmarks as you like in a book. Press control+shift+b, enter a name for your bookmark and it will be saved. You can jump back to it in the same way as with the temporary bookmark, using control+j. All bookmarks are preserved across restarts of the application.

## Reading the Text Aloud

QRead has built-in support for reading books without a screen reader installed by using any voice installed on the system. To begin reading at the current point in any document, select "Start Speaking" from the Speech menu, or press Control+s. To stop speech playback, select "Stop Speaking" from the Speech menu, or press Control+Shift+S.

### Speech Options

It is possible to set some properties on the voice which QRead uses to read text aloud. You can select which system voice QRead uses, as well as the voice's speed and volume. To do this, go into the Speech menu and click Speech Options. Select the voice in the First combo box, then press tab to select and set other voice properties. To see what the voice sounds like, press the Test Voice button. When you are satisfied, press the OK button to have your voice settings saved and applied.

## Searching

QRead allows you to easily search the current book in several different ways. The most common search method is a regular forward find. Press control+f to invoke the find dialog, enter the text you wish to find, and the cursor will be taken to the first occurance of this text if it exists with in the book and the dialog closed. To find the next occurance of this text, press f3. To find backwards in the text, use the find previous button in the find dialog, which has a hotkey of alt+p. You can also search using regular expressions. To do so, enter your search in the search dialog, click the "Use a Regular Expression" checkbox, and click the Find button. Note that it is not possible to search backwards with regular expressions.

## Navigation

### Structured navigation

QRead makes it easy to navigate through e-text which has been appropriately marked up. You can use both quickjump keys to jump to the next and previous element of a certain type, and also several navigation dialogs to get an overview of how the book is actually structured.

#### Heading navigation

When you load a document which contains headings, you can press h and shift+h to quickly jump to the next and previous heading, respectively. If you would prefer to instead navigate to a particular heading, press control+h or select Jump to Heading... from the QRead Navigation menu. You will be placed into the Jump to Heading dialog. Select a heading and press OK to be instantly jumped to the heading's position in the text.

#### Table of Contents

Press control+t to bring up the book's table of contents. This feature, like the rest of the structured navigation capabilities of QRead, depends on the document providing appropriately structured markup. You will be placed into a treeview containing the document's table of contents. Select an element from this dialog, press enter or click OK, and you will be instantly transported to the point in the text referenced by the element. Note: in PDF documents, the Table of Contents is page-based, and you may not always be placed at the absolute beginning of the particular section you select.

#### Page-based Navigation

In documents which support the concept of paging, you can use quickjump keys to quickly flip between pages. To rapidly jump to the next page, press p. To jump to the previous, press shift+p. To pick a particular page to jump to, select Jump To Page from the Navigation menu, or press control+p.

### Percentage based navigation

Tabbing once from the book text will bring you to a percentage slider. This slider gives you a way to quickly flip through the book, making it possible to navigate by larger chunks than would be allowed for by using, for instance, page up and page down. This slider also can give you a convenient way to determine how far through the text you currently are.

### Go to a specific line

To navigate to a specific line in the current document by its number, press control+g and input it, then press enter. The cursor will be placed at the beginning of the line in question.

## Reading Bookshare Books

It is very easy to read Bookshare titles in QRead if you have a Bookshare membership. To import content from bookshare, go into the Document menu and select "Import from Bookshare." A new window will launch. By default you will be placed on the Bookshare search page of the Bookshare downloader.

On this page, it is easy to search Bookshare's immense archive. Tab once to the combo box to select your search type, which by default is set to "Author and Title." Enter the term to search for in the search term edit box and press enter. You will be automatically placed in the list of results.

Alternatively, you can browse bookshare's archive directly from the importer. To do this, navigate to the browse tab, either by pressing control+tab, or by navigating to the tab strip and using the right arrow key. You will be presented with a treeview containing Bookshare's categories. Once you have selected a category, press enter on it or click on the View button to have the titles list populated and automatically focused.

Once in the titles list, Tab once to read the description of the currently-selected result. Once you have selected something to read, press enter on it, and it will be downloaded and automatically opened in QRead. When you are done getting books from Bookshare, close the Import from Bookshare window.

## Integration with Goodreads

QRead has built-in support for Goodreads, the popular book recommendation service. The goodreads menu, which is available in the Document menu, allows you to both add status updates and reviews for the book you are currently reading. Before performing either of these activities for the first time, a browser window will open for you to log in with your Goodreads account.

## Application Options

You can easily set the language which QRead displays in, as well as a few other options in the Options dialog, available from the Document menu.

# Portable Mode

Portable mode allows you to run QRead from any folder on your computer: Dropbox, USB storage devices, and more. If you have purchased QRead, you will be required to perform a one-time product activation on every new computer you use the application on. Your settings and other information will be preserved between portable runs of the application and saved in the folder user_data inside the application's folder.

# Automatic Update

QRead has an automatic update feature. It will check for a newer version every time it is started, as well as every 2 hours. To disable the automatic update feature, add --disable-autoupdate to the application command line. Note: this flag does not work with beta versions of QRead.

# Change Log

## Version 3.2

- Added a recent documents menu
- Added an option to allow not reloading previous documents on startup
- Improved the process of finding books on Goodreads
- Fixed an issue which would cause the document navigation slider to skip around when in use
- Fixed navigating headings by level
- Improved the Jump to Document dialog

## Version 3.1

- Fixed Goodreads Logins
- Don't stick people without Bookshare logins in an infinite loop if they attempt to use Bookshare

## Version 3.0

- Added support for displaying tables in an embedded browser by pressing enter on them
- Added t and shift+t keystrokes for quickly navigating between tables.
- Added support for directly importing books from Bookshare using the Bookshare Downloader
- Integrated with Goodreads to share book status updates and reviews
- Added a Speech Options dialog for quickly setting characteristics of QRead's built-in tts support.
- Don't reload all books when opening a new one from Windows Explorer
- Stop speech immediately when Stop Speech is pressed, instead of waiting until the end of the current sentence.
- Improved DocX support including support for links, headings, and tables.

## Version 2.5

- Substantial improvements to the graphical user interface
- Mobi ebook support

## Version 2.4.3

- Improved text export
- Fixes for translated versions, especially the open dialog

## Version 2.4.2

- Dramatically improved page navigation in pdf documents

## Version 2.4.1

- Added jump to document feature to quickly focus a document based on its title
- Fixed parsing Bookshare xml books

## Version 2.4

- Added block selection
- Handle epub files with invalid ToC items
- Improved parsing of unicode pdf files
- Fixed file associations in the installer
- Added export to text

## Version 2.31

- Fixed stopping sapi speech
- Added Polish translation
- re-removed page numbers from bookshare books

## Version 2.3

- Dramatically-improved HTML parser, leading to improved display of EPub, HTML and Daisy files.

## Version 2.2

- Added portable mode

## Version 2.11

- Added HTMLZ zipped html as a supported format

## Version 2.1

- Added heading navigation by level with the number row, both forwards and backwards.
- Fixes to PDF parsing
- Fixes to Unzipped Bookshare book parsing

## Version 2.01

- Improvements to CHM parsing
- Improved upgrade logic for old qrd files

## Version 2.0

- Added Book Table of Contents
- Added links list/next and previous link
- Added jump to heading dialog and next/previous heading
- Added Jump to Page dialog and Next/Previous page
- Added basic System Voice support for self-voicing reading.
- Dramatically improved CHM parsing time
- Added quickjump keys for headings and pages
- Fixed loading unicode paths from explorer

## Version 1.5

- Enabled loading books from Windows Explorer
- Added QRead to file association dialog on Vista and above
- Work on main Window and document window sizing
- Resolved some issues with the activator
- Open EPUB documents with no title
- Fix book load order

## Version 1.4

- Improved keyboard navigation of QRead window by replacing underlying GUI layer.
- Allow for deleting bookmarks
- Minor Menu reorganization
- Fixed issues some users were experiencing with activation.

## Version 1.3

- Sped up the book reloading process
- Ensure focus is restored to the proper book when QRead is relaunched
- Only announce how many books are loaded and which book is currently focused on startup
- Correctly persist searches between QRead runs
- Only write updated book positions in focused books, being friendlier to disks.

## Version 1.2

- Fixed an issue that could cause unfocused books to lose their place at startup.
- Fixed multiple issues with find including better regular expression support and reversed searching.
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause the current book's text field to lose focus.
- Fixed the updater to no longer hold the application open while downloading updates.

## Version 1.1

### PDF parsing

- reduced memory requirements for very large documents
- performance improvements
- - improved heuristics for processing malformed PDF input
- improved automatic language detection

### EPUB parsing

- Support for other methods of paragraph separation seen in the wild.

### CHM parsing

- Remove commented and script sections from output.