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 a wide range of document formats:
  • HTML documents (htm/html/xhtml)
  • EPUB books (epub)
  • FictionBook ebooks (fb2)
  • CHM help files (chm)
  • DAISY books (opf/zip)
  • PDF documents (pdf)
  • Word documents (doc/docx/docm)
  • PowerPoint presentations (ppt/pptx/pptm)
  • OpenDocument text files (odt/fodt)
  • OpenDocument presentations (odp/fodp)
  • RTF documents (rtf)
  • MOBI/Kindle books (mobi/azw/azw3)
  • Markdown documents (md/markdown/mdx/mdown/mdwn/mkd/mkdn/mkdown/ronn)
  • Plain text and log files (txt/log)
• Intuitive tabbed interface for managing multiple documents, with single-instance behavior so opening a file from the shell or a file association reuses the running window
• Full screen reader accessibility, including live-region status announcements for actions like search results and navigation
• Robust find functionality with match case, whole word, and regular expression options, plus persisted search history
• Seamless navigation between EPUB sections, headings (per level), pages, links, lists, list items, images, figures, tables, and separators via hotkeys similar to screen reader conventions, with a table of contents and elements list for quick jumps
• Precise navigation to specific lines or percentages within documents, plus per-document navigation history (back/forward)
• Bookmarks and notes, with optional sound feedback and a dedicated dialog to jump to any of them
• Extensive readability customization: custom fonts and colors, line/paragraph/letter spacing, text alignment, word wrap, and inline vs. placeholder table rendering
• Password-protected document support, and per-document settings (position, bookmarks, format overrides) that can be exported/imported via .paperback files
• Recently closed and recently opened document tracking, with quick reopen
• Built-in auto-update checker with stable/dev channels
• System tray support on Windows and Linux
• A pb CLI tool for scripted conversion of documents to plain text, HTML, or Markdown
• 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.

Flatpak

flatpak-builder --force-clean --repo=repo-flatpak build dev.paperback.desktop.yaml
flatpak build-bundle repo-flatpak paperback.flatpak dev.paperback.desktop
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.