I occasionally read a book or a longer text on the EPD of my YP2, usually with the YotaReader app. That works ok, but there's a small issue that annoys me: it's the jagged edges of the characters, which makes the appearance of the text less nice.
Yota uses a black & white only (2 color) mode of the EPD to provide maximum frames per second (8) without flashing, which allows for relatively smooth interaction with the EPD screen. The technique comes in handy when scrolling webpages, turning YotaReader pages without flickering, and many interactive screens, like navigating Apps in mirroring mode.
The EPD can also draw in 16 colors, which is used for the Yota panels screens, and e.g. the YotaSnap picture viewer. With 16 colors, it provides far nicer quality than the 2 color mode, at the expense of slower drawing and extra flashing.
Here's an example of the difference in quality between 2 and 16 colors:
2 colors:
16 colors:
(The 16 color photo is a bit blurry, both are actual photos of the screen taken with a cheap macro filter)
Text rendered in 16 colors looks much prettier. I'd like to be able to read a book like that!
I've been thinking for a while about a gesture that would allow the current 2 color screen contents to be re-rendered at 16 colors. So imagine browsing a web page on the EPD, or reading a book and when you're done scrolling/turning a page to a location you actually want to read or look at for longer, you'd make the gesture and the screen would 'beautify' itself into 16 colors. You could not interact with it smoothly anymore at that point, but reading or showing pictures etc would be nicer. Maybe it would be possible to flash the screen and return to 2 color mode when starting to scroll again etc.
Not sure how to go about this, but using xposed it would be possible to hook into the JNI calls that ultimately dither and draw stuff onto the back screen, or maybe at a higher level like the backscreen manager.
There are alternatives, like adapting FBReader for the EPD, with optional 16 color mode, but the gesture solution could in theory apply to anything on the screen, not just a reader app.
Anyone interested to help dig into this?
