Foliate (software)

Foliate focuses on reading and does not support book management. It supports typical e-book formats with reflowable text: EPUB (primary focus), Mobipocket, AZW(3), and no formats with fixed layout, although PDF support is being considered.

Its customizable and theme-based user interface is inspired by those of portable e-reader hardware devices. It follows the GNOME standards and automatically adapts to different screen formats.[2] It is streamlined for distraction-free reading and is described as pleasant and more polished than other free desktop applications. Books are displayed in a paginated view, with double-page or single-page view depending on screen size, or in a continuous scrolling view, with customizable typeface, spacing/margins, brightness and size/zoom. Control elements hide with an automatic fading effect while basic navigation with hidden controls is still possible by clicking/tapping on pages or arrow keys.[3] It has a toggleable navigation sidebar, can display a reading time estimate with a progress slider with chapter markers and supports multi-touch gestures such as pinch zoom. A full-screen mode and an optional traditional title bar can be activated.[3] In skeuomorphic mode, Foliate mimicks the look of a traditional paper book.

Foliate supports speech synthesis using eSpeak, eSpeakNG or Festival, albeit without automatic detection of the content language. A full-text search is available (also for annotations), as well as word lookup (in Wikipedia and Wiktionary or offline dictionaries via a dictd interface) and integration of Google Translate.

The application stores reading progress, bookmarks and annotations in a central directory using one JSON file per book. These can be synchronized with other devices, although it uses a format that does not work immediately with other reading software. It can also check for spelling errors in annotations and export them as Markdown.[4] It is not able to synchronize e-books with a hardware reader device.

The application is written in JavaScript, based on the JavaScript interpreter GJS, the epub.js library, the rendering engine WebKit and GTK 3 for the user interface. Optionally gspell can be used for spell checking of annotations.[5] Support for the Kindle formats (mobi, azwX) is based on a Python module. Resource consumption is low.

Foliate is published as Free Software, and therefore with its complete source code, under the terms of the GNU General Public License in version 3 or later. It was first published on 26 May 2019 on GitHub.[6] Binary files are distributed primarily as Flatpak packages via flathub. These can be installed on several major Linux distributions using on-board tools.[5] It has been included in the default package repositories of several distributions,[7] including Fedora, Arch and OpenSUSE. Additionally, there are Snap packages available through the snap store and a .deb file for Debian-based distributions which can also be installed and updated via a Personal Package Archive under Ubuntu and its siblings.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Foliate.

• Website
• GitHub page

• Das, Ankush (2020-04-13). "Foliate: A Modern eBook Reader App for Linux". It's FOSS. Retrieved 2020-05-25.
• Langner, Christoph (December 2019). "Tutorial – Foliate". Linux Magazine. Retrieved 2020-05-25.
• Sneddon, Joey (2019-05-30). "Foliate is an Epic eBook Reader for Linux Desktops (Updated)". OMG! Ubuntu!. Retrieved 2020-05-25.