Foliate, an excellent ebook reader for Linux, has recently launched a significant update.
According to the software developer, the application was completely rewritten utilizing the latest platform libraries, GTK4, and Adwaita, resulting in a refreshed interface and improved performance.
In addition to being ported to GTK4, Foliate 3.0 now employs its own library for parsing and rendering ePubs, eliminating the need for Epub.js or KindleUnpack. As a result, startup times and memory usage have been drastically reduced because entire files are no longer fully loaded into memory.
Despite the old adage advising against judging a book by its cover, the various visual upgrades in Foliate 3.0 (thanks to libadwaita) make it difficult to resist!
Foliate 3.0 presents its library and ebook viewer in a single, unified window. This seemingly minor modification greatly enhances the reading experience by minimizing the need for managing app windows, workspaces, etc.
The updated Paginated mode can now display more than two columns (depending on window width). It also introduces animations and offers 1:1 integration with touchscreen and touchpad gestures. Moreover, by pressing ctrl + m, users can easily toggle between paginated and scrolled layouts.
Now, you don’t need to click a button to load the library as it is automatically triggered by scrolling. The ‘add bookmark’ button has been moved to the header bar, allowing bookmarked pages to display a ribbon indicator. Additionally, a newly added sidebar contains bookmarks, table of contents, annotations, and ‘find in page’ results (when activated).
Do you enjoy copying text from eBooks to paste elsewhere? New options have been added, including the facility to copy text with HTML formatting, “copy with citation” (which appends the author and book title to the copied text) and “copy identifier” (if copying from an ePub file), enabling you to copy the CFI for pasting or sharing.
Other changes include adopting Speech Dispatcher for Foliate’s text-to-speech feature (bringing support for pausing, skipping, word highlighting, SSML, and speed and pitch controls); adding timestamps to annotations; the ability to print chapters and selections; and experimental support for PDF files.
Read through official changelog for more details on every dot, dash, and difference in this release.
That said, you may want to hold off upgrading. A few features, including OPDS and offline dictionaries, are yet to be ported to over so aren’t included in the v3.0.0 (though they’ll likely reappear in a future chapter. Support for CBR, CBT, and CB7 files has also been removed, though CBZ remains supported.
NVIDIA users should be prepared to encounter rendering issues when viewing ePub files, mainly in the form of ePubs pages are totally blank. This is down to a known bug in WebKit. A workaround mentioned on the Foliate GitHub is to run the app using WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1.
You can get the latest stable release of Foliate on Flathub, or from the Snap Store (though at the time of writing v3.0 is only in the --edge channel).
Thanks Archisman P.