Paperback

Paperback is a lightweight, fast, and accessible ebook and document reader for everyone, from casual readers to heavy power users. Designed for screen reader accessibility and a blazing fast bloat-free reading experience.

Features

• Written entirely in Rust to ensure it's modern, fast, and memory-safe
• Supports many common document formats: HTML, EPUB, FB2, CHM, PDF, DOCX, PPTX, DOC, PPT, ODT, RTF, Markdown, and plain text
• Intuitive tabbed interface for managing multiple documents
• Full screen reader accessibility
• Robust find functionality for quick document searches
• Seamless navigation between EPUB sections, headings, pages, links, lists, images, figures, and tables via hotkeys similar to screen reader conventions
• Precise navigation to specific lines or percentages within documents
• Lightweight installer that automatically sets up file associations
• Translated into numerous languages

Workspace layout

This is a Cargo workspace. The main crates are:

Crate	Description
paperback-core	Core document parsing and reading logic (library)
paperback	The GUI application (wxWidgets via wxDragon)
pb	CLI tool to convert documents to text or HTML
xtask	Build and release automation (cargo release)

Requirements

• Rust 1.87+ (edition 2024). Install via rustup.
• Rust nightly toolchain, used by the cargo fmt pre-commit hook. Install with:

  rustup toolchain install nightly
  

• CMake and Ninja, required to compile wxWidgets via wxDragon.

Optional tools

These are not needed for a basic build but are required for a complete release:

• pandoc on PATH: generates the HTML readme
• gettext tools (xgettext, msgfmt, msgmerge) on PATH: generates the translation template and compiles translations
• InnoSetup: creates the Windows installer

Building

cargo build --release

This produces the binary in target/release/. To build a full release package (zip, translations, etc.):

cargo release

This runs the xtask crate via the cargo release alias defined in .cargo/config.toml.

Pre-commit hooks

This project uses prek, a Rust-based pre-commit hook runner. Hooks are configured in prek.toml.

Install prek and set up the hooks:

cargo install prek
prek install

The following hooks run on every commit:

• trailing-whitespace: strips trailing whitespace
• end-of-file-fixer: ensures files end with a newline
• cargo fmt (nightly): formats all Rust code with cargo +nightly fmt --all

Linux

Building on Linux requires wxWidgets 3.2+ with the GTK3 backend. The wxDragon build system handles compiling the wxWidgets bindings automatically.

Nix

Run directly:

nix run github:trypsynth/paperback

Install to profile:

nix profile install github:trypsynth/paperback

Build from source:

nix run    # build and run
nix build  # build only

Flatpak

flatpak-builder --force-clean --repo=repo-flatpak build io.github.trypsynth.Paperback.yaml
flatpak build-bundle repo-flatpak paperback.flatpak io.github.trypsynth.Paperback
flatpak --user install paperback.flatpak

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Whether through issues, pull requests, or discussions, your interest is appreciated. Thanks for using Paperback!

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.