Foliate

A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer, built with GJS and Epub.js.

Website: https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/

Documentation: https://github.com/johnfactotum/foliate/wiki

Features

• View .epub, .mobi, .azw, and .azw3 files in two-page view or scrolled view
• Customize font, line-spacing, margins, and brightness
• Light, sepia, dark, and invert mode, or add your own custom themes
• Reading progress slider with chapter marks
• Bookmarks and annotations
• Find in book
• Quick dictionary lookup with Wiktionary, Wikipedia, and dictd, or translate text with Google Translate
• Touchpad gestures—use two-finger swipe to turn the page
• Basic text-to-speech support with eSpeak NG and Festival

Installation

Distribution packages

Distro	Package Name/Link
Arch Linux	foliate
Fedora	foliate
Manjaro	foliate
Ubuntu	foliate
Void Linux	foliate

Debian packages can be downloaded from the releases page.

Optional dependencies

For Mobipocket (.mobi) and Kindle File Format (.azw, .azw3) support, you would need Python (2.7 or >= 3.4).

Auto-hyphenation is done using CSS hyphenation. To enable CSS hyphenation in WebKitGTK, you will need to install the hyphenation rules, e.g., hyphen-en for English, hyphen-fr for French, etc.

For offline dictionary support, install dictd.

For text-to-speech support, install espeak-ng, or festival, and packages for the individual voices.

To enable spellchecking for notes, gspell is requried.

Building manually from source

The following dependencies are required for building:

• meson (>= 0.40)
• gettext

The following are runtime requirements:

• gjs (>= 1.52)
• webkit2gtk

To install, run the following commands:

meson build --prefix=/usr
ninja -C build
sudo ninja -C build install

To uninstall, run

sudo ninja -C build uninstall

Build and run from source without installing

The following commands will build Foliate and install it inside a directory:

meson build --prefix=$PWD/run
ninja -C build
ninja -C build install

To run the application, you'll need to set the schema directory for GSettings:

GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR=$PWD/run/share/glib-2.0/schemas ./run/bin/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate

Building a Debian/Ubuntu Package

sudo apt install build-essential debhelper meson gettext
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -nc

Flatpak

Flathub

Foliate is available on Flathub.

Building Flatpaks manually

Using Gnome Builder

Open Gnome Builder, choose "Clone Repository…", and follow the instructions. After cloning the project, hit Ctrl+F5 to build and run Foliate.

Using flatpak-builder

flatpak-builder --force-clean --install --user build com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate.json

Snap

Foliate is available on the Snap Store.

Daily builds

You can test out the latest code in this repository using the edge channel of the snap. Run snap install --edge foliate to install the latest build from master. (snap refresh --edge foliate if you already have the snap installed)

Building the snap manually

You can build the snap manually using snapcraft. Install snapcraft and run snapcraft in the root of this repository.

Screenshots

Primary menu:

Navigation:

Lookup:

Annotations:

Skeuomorphic mode:

Dark mode:

Book metadata display:

Alternative sidebar UI:

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Note: two JavaScript libraries are bundled in this software:

• Epub.js, which is licensed under FreeBSD. The included file is patched to fix #76 and #177
• The minified version of JSZip, which is dual-licensed. You may use it under the MIT license or the GPLv3 license. See LICENSE.markdown

This software also includes parts from KindleUnpack, which is liscensed under GPL-3.0.