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Project Vision & Scope: CrossPoint Reader

The goal of CrossPoint Reader is to create an efficient, open-source reading experience for the Xteink X4. We believe a dedicated e-reader should do one thing exceptionally well: facilitate focused reading.

1. Core Mission

To provide a lightweight, high-performance firmware that maximizes the potential of the X4, prioritizing legibility and usability over "swiss-army-knife" functionality.

2. Scope

In-Scope

These are features that directly improve the primary purpose of the device.

  • User Experience: E.g. User-friendly interfaces, and interactions, both inside the reader and navigating the firmware. This includes things like button mapping, book loading, and book navigation like bookmarks.
  • Document Rendering: E.g. Support for rendering documents (primarily EPUB) and improvements to the rendering engine.
  • Format Optimization: E.g. Efficiently parsing EPUB (CSS/Images) and other documents within the device's capabilities.
  • Typography & Legibility: E.g. Custom font support, hyphenation engines, and adjustable line spacing.
  • E-Ink Driver Refinement: E.g. Reducing full-screen flashes (ghosting management) and improving general rendering.
  • Library Management: E.g. Simple, intuitive ways to organize and navigate a collection of books.
  • Local Transfer: E.g. Simple, "pull" based book loading via a basic web-server or public and widely-used standards.
  • Language Support: E.g. Support for multiple languages both in the reader and in the interfaces.
  • Reference Tools: E.g. Local dictionary lookup. Providing quick, offline definitions to enhance comprehension without breaking focus.

Out-of-Scope

These items are rejected because they compromise the device's stability or mission.

  • Interactive Apps: No Notepads, Calculators, or Games. This is a reader, not a PDA.
  • Active Connectivity: No RSS readers, News aggregators, or Web browsers. Background Wi-Fi tasks drain the battery and complicate the single-core CPU's execution.
  • Media Playback: No Audio players or Audio-books.
  • Complex Annotation: No typed out notes. These features are better suited for devices with better input capabilities and more powerful chips.

In-scope — Technically Unsupported

These features align with CrossPoint's goals but are impractical on the current hardware or produce poor UX.

  • Clock Display: The ESP32-C3's RTC drifts significantly during deep sleep; making the clock untrustworthy after any sleep cycle. NTP sync could help, but CrossPoint doesn't connect to the internet on every boot.

  • PDF Rendering: PDFs are fixed-layout documents, so rendering them requires displaying pages as images rather than reflowable text — resulting in constant panning and zooming that makes for a poor reading experience on e-ink.

3. Idea Evaluation

While I appreciate the desire to add new and exciting features to CrossPoint Reader, CrossPoint Reader is designed to be a lightweight, reliable, and performant e-reader. Things which distract or compromise the device's core mission will not be accepted. As a guiding question, consider if your idea improve the "core reading experience" for the average user, and, critically, not distract from that reading experience.

Note to Contributors: If you are unsure if your idea fits the scope, please open a Discussion before you start coding!