Until now, your TI-Nspire could not read documents files other than those created by the TI-Nspire software.
It was not possible to put on your calculator DOC/DOCX (Microsft Word), ODT (OpenOffice Write) or PDF files (Adobe Acrobat).
You couldn't either convert those documents to the TI-Nspire document format as it does manage very limited formatting options.
A solution was the conversion of these documents into BMP, JPEG or PNG images.
Unfortunately, the TI-Nspire system provides a very limited image reader without any zoom or scrolling support, thus limiting the images to a maximum size of 318x212 pixels inadapted to US letter documents.

A solution came with the mViewer image reader for owners of TI-Nspire still able to install Ndless.


A drawback of this solution however, was to have a different image for each page, and therefore constantly have to close and reopen images for a document with several pages.

Alas, Texas Instruments decided for back to school 2013 to permanently block any possibility of installing Ndless on new TI-Nspire CX hardware revision 'J', thus creating an unfair inequality among buyers in regards to their future exams where some of them will still be able to build a real world of documents on their TI-Nspire while the others nothing, causing discontent among those last purchasers who can consider having been deceived after being forbidden features granted to their predecessors and which were often one of their purchase criteria.



Today, we're not going to reduce this inequality, quite the contrary...  in the next few lines, some of you may explode with joy while the others may be completely disgusted...



Because tonight is a great day in the history of the TI- Nspire ...
Legimet was able to port the MuPDF library  and has just released the first third-party document reader for TI-Nspire CX and TI- Nspire CM !
Named nPDF, it supports PDF, XPS and CBZ documents.

Note that so far it does not work on classic TI-Nspire. But anyway, the program is already 8MB large and wouldn't let you with many space left for those documents on such calculators.

Compered to the previous mViewer solution, advantages of this new player should be:

• no need to bother looking for a tool to convert your documents to images any more, or even worse to do it manually
  
• no need to waste time opening multiple files on the calculator any more before finding the right page of the document

I was initially quite skeptical on the PDF support, as it is not a free format and did undergo many changes in years. However, I've tested several complex documents with many images and tables in addition to the text and have been amazed by an absolutely perfect display !

For example, here below, reading the 7^th of the 125 pages of the Getting started Started with the TI-Nspire ™ CX / TI-Nspire CX CAS Handheld .




Even if the nPDF reader is an extraordinary technical performance, it suffers (at least for now) from many drawbacks and limitations:

• no possibility to zoom
• no horizontal scrolling (all the pages are automatically scaled to the width of the screen, 320 pixels)
  
• no button to skip to the previous/next page (you've got to scroll to the bottom/top of a page in order to move to the next/previous) :(
  
• no continuous scrolling (pressing up/down arrows just produces a simple little up/down scroll, you then have to release the key and repress it, and again and again...) :(

Small things, whose many would be certainly easy and quick to fix with very gew C code lines, it's the matter of a simple weekend, but which for now are going to litterally ruin your user experience, unless you're happy with the video below... :(


Note that nPDF did crash here on the last page change. I think I could spot the problem. We notice indeed that when we're reaching the bottom of a page, the reader can sometimes cross the bottom page which displays some noise lines on the bottom of the screen. This happens with documents whose page height is not a multiple  of the vertical scrolling step. At this point, the reader reads random data outside of the memory allocated for ??the page data, which actually causes such crashes easily.


Briefly, in its current version 0.1, nPDF will be the right thing :

• to documents with very few pages (because of the crash risk on page changes)
  
• to multi-page documents requiring no or very little vertical scrolling (US letter landscape format for example - because of the non-continuous vertical scrolling)
  
• to one paged documents for those requiring vertical scrolling (because of the absence of keys to move to the next/previous page)
  
• and to documents with text large enough to be readable even once resized to 320 pixels wide (because of the automatic resizing to 320 pixels wide without any zoom possibility)

In my opinion, nPDF is not yet an end-user acceptable alternative to mViewer for reading documents on the TI-Nspire , but it's perfectly able to surpass it and to become the main TI-Nspire document reader before your 2014 exams, unfortunately only for some of you , I know, if the author has time to continue its development for the end-user now! ;D

So do not hesitate to thank the author, support him or encourage him, and even making your own comments or suggestions. ;)



Source and download: http://ourl.ca/20218

Cross-posted from: http://tiplanet.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13557&p=153843&lang=en

There are some bugs, but this program is really great! It was waited for years and you did it Legimet. Thank you very much.

This (the PDF reader) is really good news. The TI-Nspire CX is perfect for reading PDFs—I can see it being a built-in feature honestly.