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:
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humongous JS monstrosity that runs inside a web browser OR packages an entire chrome copy into it with a bloated dependency hell
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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.
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.
I.e. install a Browser extension that does this
As far as I know,
MuPDFis 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, hasvistyle key bindings, and has plugins for viewing PDF, EPUB, CB, and others. Works pretty well in a keyboard centric desktop environment (I useHyprland).+1 for Zathura.
Assuming you have a Firefox derived browser installed, you could just add an EPUB extension to the browser.
Epy reader is command line, so not very discoverable, but I freaking love it
Take Emacs. Then you have everything. 😎
There’s a couple of command lines e-reader apps you may want to try.
less 😎
puppy is really an underappreciated distro.
FBreader package is <4mb. The android app is excellent (best ebook reader imho). I remember the PC version’s interface to be somewhat clunky. But it might fit your bill.
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.
