WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 20390743

(no title)

lulouie | 6 years ago

I'm using Linux and trying to find a e-reader recently. Here is what I tested on Arch:

Calibre: Failed to open

Okular: Ugly, cannot modify margin

bookworm: No two-page view, only scrolling-mode, and scrolling-mode cannot get the reading progress

zathura: too simplify resulting in not know how to use

lector: cannot recognize epub......

Buka: cannot open the book. (I don't get the logic flow, create a list first, then import the book, then crash)

Until I found Foliate, it support two-page view w/ progress bar, it support epub will in different language (I test en_US and zh_TW), fast lookup (gtrans, Wiktionary, Wikipedia), good UI, ...etc

discuss

order

dmm|6 years ago

> Calibre: Failed to open

Perhaps this says more about Arch than it does Calibre.

lulouie|6 years ago

yep, is because Arch (basically because qt5 upgrade...), and with the issue on it: https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/63051

$ calibre

Fatal Python error: PyQt5.QtCore: Unable to embed qt.conf

[1] 13321 abort (core dumped) calibre

At that moment, I didn't have time to workaround on it :(

michaelmrose|6 years ago

Regarding Zathura the most readily available resource can be found by running man zathura and man zathurarc. The same info is of course on the web.

It does 2 page view, optionally shows progress, and with the mupdf backend supports epub and pdf and a few more.

Now it doesn't support mobi but calibre can automatically create an epub from the mobi on import.

Calibre is still useful in 17 different ways even if you don't actually use it to read the book.

elagost|6 years ago

Running Arch as well and I use the Calibre Flatpak to manage my Kindle. I plug it in every month or so and haven't had any failures in the last year. I've found that Flatpaks solve the problem of some older programs not working well on Arch or some programs not getting updated on Debian.

afranchuk|6 years ago

I've never personally used it for epub, but apparently mupdf works with epub files. It's my go-to PDF viewer at least. Just be sure to read the man pages as most operations are keyboard hotkeys.

michaelmrose|6 years ago

Mupdf is a better backend for zathura than it is a reader in its own right. It's UI is lacking most notably lacking the ability to access the index.

agumonkey|6 years ago

foliate seems a great thing, but

    /usr/bin/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate


 .. come on

ayoisaiah|6 years ago

This scheme of naming binaries is popular amongst Elementary os apps. Maybe that's were the Dev took the idea from.

I don't mind it, and if it bothers you, you can easily alias it to something else

pastage|6 years ago

Fbreader is nice, I've only used Calibre for converting ebooks not sure you can read in it.

abrowne|6 years ago

I liked FBReader until I realized it wasn't displaying the blank lines used by the book series I was reading to separate sections in a chapter. Undoubtably the ebooks' CSS was bad, but other readers, like my Sony e-ink device, displayed them OK.

loeg|6 years ago

Calibre's ebook-viewer is tolerable when your distro doesn't break Qt5/Calibre; I think that's an Arch problem, unfortunately.

dsr_|6 years ago

The epubreader addon for Firefox is not perfect, but it is pretty good. It would be better if it would:

- reflow on window size change

- allow me to pick any system font to read in

ernst_klim|6 years ago

Impressive, you've tried so much e-readers except the right one: FBreader.

darkpuma|6 years ago

pandoc+emacs. I also use the read-aloud package, which all together makes the best ereader+TTS experience. (However I run the TTS over the lan on a mac, because FOSS text-to-speech is awful.)

unixhero|6 years ago

Well you forgot FB Reader

baybal2|6 years ago

Ever tried Evince?

lulouie|6 years ago

I test it on macOS, it can't work will with epub from Kobo :(