*NIX: Readers for epub

[ewemoa]

Any favorites for reading epubs?

FBReader crashed here and didn't get Cool Reader to display a page with a source code sample so well, but Sigil (though primarily an editor) seems to be working better.

I guess there may also be Firefox plugins (e.g. EPUBReader), but haven't used them recently.


Links to Tested Readers

calibre
Cool Reader
EPUBReader
FBReader
Lucidor
Sigil

[40hz]

I'll either use FBReader (which has yet to crash on me) or Calibre.

Calibre may be a bit of overkill for you since it also incorporates e-book management functions and format converters.

[ewemoa]

Thanks for the suggestion.  I'll give Calibre a try.

[ewemoa]

Calibre definitely does a better job (at least by default) of displaying the source code sample being tested

I'm not inclined to use the non-viewer features...perhaps I should try to see if I can make use of just the viewer portion.

[ewemoa]

I found this thread @mobileread -- looks promising

[ewemoa]

So it looks like Calibre comes with a binary named ebook-viewer and this can be used on its own.

Didn't find a man page, but passing it --help yielded roughly:

Usage: ebook-viewer [options] file

View an ebook.

Whenever you pass arguments to ebook-viewer that have spaces in them, enclose the arguments in quotation marks.

Options:
  --version                   show program's version number and exit

  -h, --help                   show this help message and exit

  --raise-window           If specified, viewer window will try to come to the
                                   front when started.

  -f, --full-screen, --fullscreen
                                   If specified, viewer window will try to open full
                                   screen when started.

  --debug-javascript     Print javascript alert and console messages to the
                                   console

  --open-at=OPEN_AT  The position at which to open the specified book. The
                                     position is a location as displayed in the top left
                                     corner of the viewer.

Created by Kovid Goyal <kovid@kovidgoyal.net>

Worked fine on the file I tested -- thanks 40hz!

[ewemoa]

Also tried Lucidor -- it was fairly nice (supported table of contents, annotations, source code looked ok, etc.), but I failed to figure out how to navigate between pages using keyboard shortcuts...

[ewemoa]

Tested EPUBReader as well -- seemed ok.  Not too psyched about using a web broiwser based reader -- not quite sure why that is.

[app103]

EPUBReader is my reader of choice on PC, for both Windows and *nix, which isn't saying much, since I can't read certain types of books on the desktop, and most books in epub format fall into that category best read while lying on my sofa.

[40hz]

Worked fine on the file I tested -- thanks 40hz!

You're most welcome!

[ewemoa]

On a side note...

most books in epub format fall into that category best read while lying on my sofa.

That's the feeling I was getting from a number of the Android readers I've looked at -- as in, the reading experience seems to be tailored toward proceeding in one direction page after page, rather than moving around to various points of the book.

I'm hoping to find something that can at least handle source code formatting decently -- Aldiko seems better than the others in this regard, but I haven't figured out how to view via scrolling.  I find that it can be hard to read some segments of source code without being able to scroll...

[ewemoa]

As I use calibre's viewer, there's one thing that repeatedly surprises me -- the boundary / end of the current "page" (source page, not what the reader tries to present) is not obvious to me.  Consequently, when a boundary is crossed, the transition is sudden and often unexpected.  To cope with this, I've temporarily enabled the following in Preferences -> General -> Page Flip Options -> Line scrolling stops at page brealks.  This prevents the sudden transition, but I'm wondering if there is some way to get visual feedback about page boundaries instead with the ability to scroll across boundaries...

Any ideas?

[ewemoa]

I discovered by accident that SumatraPDF displays epubs -- so using it via Wine seems to be an option.

To get the table of contents to appear though, tweaking via Advanced Options appeared necessary.  Unfortunately, opening of the document seems much slower with the tweak.