Flatpak App of the Week: Foliate – Simple and Modern eBook Viewer

Foliate

This week’s “Flatpak App of the Week” is Foliate, a powerful, open-source, and modern ebook viewer software created by John Factotum for GNU/Linux distributions.

Written in GTK, Foliate is a great ebook viewer/reader software with lots of cool features. While its interface may look simple, don’t be fooled because Foliate comes with numerous options and nifty tools that go beyond just reading ebooks.

Foliate’s user interface has two main views, Library and Catalogs. While in the Catalogs section you’ll be able to browse and download free ebooks from some well-known sources, the Library view is the place you’ll find every ebook that you’ve downloaded through the app or manually opened with reading progress information.

The app offers single-column, two-column, or continuous scrolling layouts for reading ebooks, support for right-to-left (RTL) and vertical text, auto-hyphenation, as well as a skeuomorphic mode that mimics the look and feel of a real-world ebook reader device with an e-ink display.

Supported ebook formats include EPUB, Kindle, Mobipocket, FictionBook, as well as comic book archive formats. The app also supports OPDS feeds if you want to get books online.

As mentioned before, there are lots of cool new features for all your ebook reading and management needs. For example, you can search text or paragraphs in an entire ebook, you can zoom in and rotate images, you can open footnotes in popovers, you can turn pages with a two-finger swipe gesture, or you can open multiple books at the same time.

The app also features ToC (Table of Contents) menu or sidebar, a progress slider with chapter marks, support for adjusting fonts, line-spacing, and margins, support for customizing colors and brightness, automatic hiding of mouse cursor and reading controls, reading time estimates, bookmarks, as well as annotations with the ability to search and export them to plain text, HTML, Markdown, or other formats.

Some of the nifty tools that Foliate offers for those who want more than reading include the ability to look up words in Wiktionary, Wikipedia, or offline DICT and StarDict dictionaries, translate passages with Google Translate, as well as text-to-speech support via eSpeak NG, Festival, or other TTS engines.

If you’re looking for the perfect ebook reader software for your GNU/Linux desktop, look no further because Foliate is a really great application that comes as a Flatpak, which means that you can easily install it on any GNU/Linux distribution from Flathub.

Last updated 2 years ago

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