KOReader
KOReader is a document viewer application, originally created for Kindle
e-ink readers. It currently runs on Kindle 5 (Touch), Kindle Paperwhite,
Kobo, PocketBook and Android (2.3+) devices. Developers can also run Koreader emulator
for development purpose on desktop PC with Linux or Windows operating system.
Main features for users
supports multi-format documents including:
paged fixed-layout formats: PDF, DjVu and CBZ
reflowable e-book formats: ePub, fb2, mobi, doc, chm and plain text
scanned PDF/DjVu documents can also be reflowed with built-in K2pdfopt
use StarDict dictionaries / Wikipedia to lookup words
highlights can be exported to Evernote cloud account
highly customizable reader view and typeset
setting arbitrary page margins / line space
choosing external fonts and styles
built-in multi-lingual hyphenation dictionaries
supports adding custom online OPDS catalogs
calibre integration
search calibre metadata on your koreader device
send ebooks from calibre library to your koreader device wirelessly
browser calibre library and download ebooks via calibre OPDS server
can share ebooks with other koreader devices wirelessly
various optimizations for e-ink devices
paginated menus without animation
adjustable text contrast
multi-lingual user interface
online Over-The-Air software update
Highlights for developers
frontend written in Lua scripting language
running on multi-platform with only one code-base maintained
developing koreader in any editor without compilation
high runtime efficiency by LuaJIT acceleration
light-weight widget toolkit for small memory footprint
extensible with plugin system
interfaced backends for documents parsing and rendering
high quality document backend libraries like MuPDF, DjvuLibre and CREngine
interacting with frontend via LuaJIT FFI for best performence
in active development
contributed by developers around the world
continuous integration with Travis CI
with unit tests and code coverage test
automatic release of nightly builds
free as in free speech
licensed under Affero GPL v3
all dependencies are free software
Check out the KOReader wiki to learn
more about this project.
Building Prerequisites
These instructions for how to get and compile the source are intended for a Linux
OS. Windows users are suggested to develop in a Linux VM or use Wubi.
To get and compile the source you must have patch, wget, unzip, git, autoconf,
subversion and cmake installed, as well as a version of autoconf greater than 2.64.
You also need nasm and of course a compiler like gcc or clang. If you want to
cross-compile for other architectures, you need a proper cross-compile toolchain.
Your GCC should be at least of version 4.7 for both native and cross compiling.
Users of Debian and Ubuntu can install the required packages using:
sudo apt-get install build-essential libtool gcc-multilib libffi-dev \
patch wget unzip git autoconf subversion cmake nasm libsdl1.2-dev
Cross compile toolchains are available for Ubuntu users through these commands:
# for Kindle
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi g++-arm-linux-gnueabi
# for Kobo
sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf
# for Win32
sudo apt-get install gcc-mingw-w64-i686 g++-mingw-w64-i686
A recent version of Android SDK/NDK and ant are needed in order to build
Koreader for Android devices.
sudo apt-get install ant
You might also need SDL library packages if you want to compile and run
koreader on Linux PC. Fedora users can install SDL and SDL-devel package.
Ubuntu users probably need to install libsdl1.2-dev package:
Getting the source
git clone https://github.com/koreader/koreader.git
cd koreader
make fetchthirdparty
Building & Running & Testing
For real eink devices
To build installable package for Kindle:
make TARGET=kindle clean kindleupdate
To build installable package for Kobo:
make TARGET=kobo clean koboupdate
To build installable package for PocketBook you need first to obtain the SDK
from PocketBook:
make pocketbook-toolchain
then similarly with Kindle and Kobo building run this command:
make TARGET=pocketbook clean pbupdate
To run, you must call the script reader.lua. Run it without arguments to see
usage notes. Note that the script and the luajit binary must be in the same
directory.
You may checkout our nightlybuild script to see how to build a
package from scratch.
For Android devices
Make sure the "android" and "ndk-build" tools are in your PATH variable
and the NDK variable points to the root directory of the Android NDK.
First, run this command to make a standalone android cross compiling toolchain
from NDK:
make android-toolchain
Then, build installable package for Android:
make TARGET=android clean androidupdate
For emulating KOReader on Linux and Windows
To build an emulator on current Linux machine just run:
make clean && make
If you want to compile the emulator for Windows you need to run:
make TARGET=win32 clean && make TARGET=win32
To run koreader on your developing machine
(you may need to change $(MACHINE) to the arch of your machine such as 'x86_64'):
cd koreader-$(MACHINE)/koreader && ./reader.lua -d ../../test
To run unit tests in KOReader:
make test
To run Lua static-analysis for KOReader:
make statick-check
You may need to checkout the travis config file to setup up
a proper testing environment. Briefly, you need to install luarocks and
then install busted with luarocks. The "eng" language data file for
tesseract-ocr is also need to test OCR functionality. Finally, make sure
that luajit in your system is at least of version 2.0.2.
You can also specify size of emulator's screen via environment variables.
For more information, please refer to koreader-base's README.
To use your own koreader-base repo instead of the default one change KOR_BASE
environment variable:
make KOR_BASE=../koreader-base
This will be handy if you are developing koreader-base and want to test your
modifications with kroeader frontend. NOTE: only support relative path for now.
Translation
Please refer to l10n's README to grab the latest translations
from the Koreader project on Transifex with this command:
make po
If your language is not listed on the Transifex project, please don't hesitate
to send a language request here.
Variables in translation
Some strings contain variables that should remain unaltered in translation.
For example:
The title of the book is %1 and its author is %2.
This might be displayed as:
The title of the book is The Republic and its author is Plato.
To aid localization the variables may be freely positioned:
De auteur van het boek is %2 en de titel is %1.
That would result in:
De auteur van het boek is Plato en de titel is The Republic.
Use ccache
Ccache can speed up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting
when the same compilation is being done again. In other words, it will decrease
build time when the source have been built. Ccache support has been added to
KOReader's build system. Before using it, you need to install a ccache in your
system.
in Ubuntu use:sudo apt-get install ccache
in Fedora use:sudo yum install ccache
install from source:
unarchieve the source package in a directory
cd to that directory and use:./configure && make && sudo make install
to disable ccache, use export USE_NO_CCACHE=1 before make.
for more detail about ccache. visit: