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.

  • @[email protected]
    18•1 year ago

    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.

  • @beerclue
    15•1 year ago

    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).

  • @[email protected]
    8•1 year ago

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

  • mesamune
    2•1 year ago

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

  • @jennraeross
    2•1 year ago

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

  • Bob Smith
    1•1 year ago

    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.