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Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

github.com

21–30 of 120 posts

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#21
post #2

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…

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.

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#22
post #4
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

you can reader using Calibre, it's far from being a good reader https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/calibre-ebook-re...

If you open a .mobi in Calibre it takes tens of seconds, on a reasonably fast system, to open small (<2meg) books. I'd agree with the other comments here - Calibre is great in terms of it being powerful (web server to serve up books directly to a kindle without having to plug it in, search is ok once you know how to use it) but has a terrible UI (I shouldn't have to google to discover how to search my local library).

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#23
post #16

Why don't use the compilable language? Nobody think about resources these days.

How do you know they didn't consider resources?

If you want to compile a language you're going to need a compiler and a linker. Do you know how much water it takes to compile a single executable? Water that's better used irrigating a field which could support hundreds of well-written python and bash scripts.

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

foliate seems a great thing, but /usr/bin/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate .. come on

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

of course, after you locate the binary in your fs

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

foliate seems a great thing, but /usr/bin/com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate .. come on

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

It is a scheme used by Flatpak.

The package prefix is mandatory, in order for flatpaks not to stomp on each other.

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#26
post #16

Why don't use the compilable language? Nobody think about resources these days.

In this case, I don't know how much it matters--EPUB is basically HTML, so you are going to be based around a browser-like component anyway. Might as well code the UI in js.

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#28
Ecosystems are tough. I'd never used meson, so I installed it using apt-get. I tried to build Foliate, and got an error about wrong arguments to `project()`. Searching for the error brought results about a wrong version, so I uninstalled meson and reinstalled it using pip. The installation completed fine. I went to run Foliate (com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate, if that wasn't somehow obvious), and I got an error from GJS (JS ERROR: SyntaxError: invalid property id @ resource:///com/github/johnfactotum/Foliate/js/main.js:57 JS_EvaluateScript() failed).

If it's obvious to anyone else what's wrong here, it's not obvious to me. Isn't one of the advantages of interpreting the code on the target platform supposed to be portability? If so, why is it I so seldom can can get anything written for GJS, or Node, or a Python program not my own, to install and run without a three-hour yak shave?

I'm sure this is a great project, and I mean no disrespect to the author, who did a better job of installation instructions than most — but I'm tired of installation being such a pain. It's almost, but not quite, enough to make a guy run Windows.

Re: Foliate – A simple and modern GTK eBook viewer

#30
post #27

Could OP or someone else give an overview of how web-based interfaces work on native apps like this, without using something like electron? Is there a full js interpreter, dom, css parser, etc in something like Foliate?

I think it is mostly done by: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs
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