Note

This is the master branch, which contains the code for the old v2.x versions. To learn about the newer GTK 4 version, see the gtk4 branch.

Foliate

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

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

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

Features

• Supported formats:
  • EPUB (.epub, .epub3)
  • Kindle (.azw, .azw3) and Mobipocket (.mobi)
  • FictionBook (.fb2, .fb2.zip)
  • Comic book archive (.cbr, .cbz, .cbt, .cb7)
  • Plain text (.txt)
• Single-column, two-column, or continuous scrolling layouts
• Adjust font, line-spacing, and margins
• Customize colors and brightness
• Reading progress slider with chapter marks
• Bookmarks and annotations
• Find in book
• Open footnotes in popovers
• Touchpad gestures—use two-finger swipe to turn the page
• Quick dictionary lookup with Wiktionary, Wikipedia, dictd, and sdcv, or translate text with Google Translate
• Basic text-to-speech support with eSpeak NG and Festival

Installation

Distribution packages

Distro	Package Name/Link	Maintainer
Arch Linux	foliate	Jerome Leclanche
Fedora	foliate	Artem Polishchuk
Manjaro	foliate
Ubuntu (Snap)	foliate	Merlijn Sebrechts and John Factotum
Ubuntu (PPA)	foliate Stable Releases com.github.johnfactotum.foliate Daily Buillds	Archisman Panigrahi
Void Linux	foliate	Lorem

Debian packages can be downloaded from the releases page.

Optional dependencies

iso-codes (>= 3.67) is needed for displaying language and region names.

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 or sdcv.

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

To enable spellchecking for notes, gspell (gir1.2-gspell-1 for Debian based distributions) is required.

libhandy (gir1.2-handy-0.0) is recommended to make the interface work better on larger as well as smaller screens.

If tracker3 (gir1.2-tracker-3.0) is installed, it can be used to track the locations of files.

Building manually from source

The following dependencies are required for building:

• meson (>= 0.40)
• gettext

The following are runtime requirements:

• gjs (>= 1.52)
• webkit2gtk (gir1.2-webkit2-4.0 for Debian based distributions)

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: The following JavaScript libraries are bundled in this software:

• Epub.js, which is licensed under FreeBSD. The included file is patched with various fixes and enhancements (see the repo for Foliate's Epub.js fork for details).
• A patched version of JSZip, which is dual-licensed. You may use it under the MIT license or the GPLv3 license. See LICENSE.markdown
• libarchivejs, which is MIT licensed. It is a WASM port of the popular libarchive C library.
• crypto-js, which is MIT licensed. The MD5 module is used to generate identifiers for files that don't have unique identifiers.

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