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Hong Kong breakthrough means e-publishing for comic readers

They've invented the term "m-publishing" for mobile book technology on smartphones - starting on Symbian smartphones and PocketPC platforms. "They" are a startup company called Barefoot, based in Hong Kong. And it really can cope with comics - even in Chinese script.

The technology was unveiled here in Prague at the Nokia Forum summit meeting by Mark Hillsdon, CEO of  Barefoot

The demand for the package originated in Japan, said Hillsdon, where the cult cartoon formats are big business; but the execution was designed to cope not just with images, but text.

The trick is to avoid system fonts. Instead of having to write software which queries the hand-held or laptop device and finds out what fonts it has, and what the sizes are, Barefoot takes the text and generates a vector graphic representation. The font technology is standard -  Dynacomware fonts are already available, and others can easily be plugged in.

"This lets us zoom in on text for legibility," said Hillsdon. " We can let the user zoom on a text bubble, while keeping the background image at the same proportions; and we can even switch languages from Chinese to English."

The next stage is to provide these tools to Python scripting users, followed by C and C++ programmers, he said. "We now have a Linux version, too."

The user can allow the story to unfold as planned by the "guide" software - programmed so that frame follows frame in the correct order, zooming in on the smaller frames, then zooming out on the larger ones. But at any stage, the reader can drop out of the guided tour, and go back, and zoom in and out on specific frames. When you resume the guide, it will move to the nearest script node.