What is a small .EPUB reader that is easy to install for my small Puppy remaster?

grey@discuss.tchncs.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 58 points –

My question is basically the title. I'm making my own Puppy Linux remaster and it already has a .PDF reader for it that is very small. I think it's called Evince? It has a native GTK UI and starts in a second, uses very little RAM and CPU. Now I need a .EPUB reader. I've seen a couple different .EPUB reader apps out there for different distros, and they all the .EPUB readers seem to fall into a couple categories:

  • humongous JS monstrosity that runs inside a web browser OR packages an entire chrome copy into it with a bloated dependency hell

  • something else that is humongous and has dependency hell but non secretly a massive web app inside a web browser under the hood.

So is there some third option that's small and light and easy to install like the normal .PDF reader? I'm just asking because I honestly didn't find one that fit the bill.

17

You're going to have a web browser installed, right? .epub files are just zips with HTML/images/CSS inside. Just find the HTML file with named "toc" and go from there.

As far as I know, MuPDF is not that heavy, and can view both PDFs and EPUBs (and others).

I personally use zathura, which is a very, very light weight document viewer, has vi style key bindings, and has plugins for viewing PDF, EPUB, CB, and others. Works pretty well in a keyboard centric desktop environment (I use Hyprland).

MuPDF https://mupdf.com/ It does PDF and Epub and is pretty light.

epy https://github.com/wustho/epy is a cli Epub reader

I didn't realize MuPDF did both! That might be what I need. Thank you.

Also, are you banned? I can only see your post in my inbox, but not on the thread.

if he was banned you couldn't see him anywhere, probably federation being funcky, or your app not updating both at the same time

Just checked the modlog. I don't appear to be banned. Funky Federation stuff.

I have no idea how I would be banned, I'm not super active. How can I find out if I've been banned?

Assuming you have a Firefox derived browser installed, you could just add an EPUB extension to the browser.

There's a couple of command lines e-reader apps you may want to try.

Epy reader is command line, so not very discoverable, but I freaking love it

One option is to convert to txt for any text-only epubs that you have. There are a ton of lightweight options if you're willing to use format-shifted copies on your computer.