Foliate Linux eBook Reader 1.4.0 Includes Wikipedia Lookup, Google Translate Support
Foliate Linux EPUB eBook reader version 1.4.0 was released with a new sidebar, option to lookup words on Wikipedia and offline dictionaries, translate entire passages with Google Translate, and more.
Foliate is a fairly new free and open source GTK eBook reader for Linux. Built with GJS and Epub.js, the eBook reader lets users view EPUB files in either a two-page view, or scrolled view, on top of which it adds a plethora of useful features, including:
- Reading progress slider with chapter marks
- Bookmarks and annotations
- Customizable font face and size, line-spacing, margins and brightness
- Light, sepia, dark, and invert mode, or add your own custom themes
- Find in book
- Keyboard shortcuts and touchpad gestures
While new, having its first release back in May, Foliate is already a great EPUB eBook viewer, already incorporating most of the features you'd need in an eBook viewer.
Besides these important to have features for an eBook viewer, the application also has various minor features that many will find useful, like viewing an eBook's metadata, remember where you left off, fullscreen mode, and more.
[Update] In a newly released 1.5.0 version, Foliate adds support for viewing .mobi, .azw, and .azw3 files, basic text-to-speech support, and option to export eBook annotations to HTML, plain text or JSON.
Foliate 1.4.0 was released recently with interesting new features and other changes. Until now, the Linux eBook reader only supported looking up words on Wiktionary - with the new 1.4.0 release though, it also supports looking up words on Wikipedia, dictd, and translating text using Google Translate.
Since there are now multiple possible actions that can take place when selecting a word, a popup window is presented, from where you can choose Dictionary (with a drop-down to select the dictionary), Wikipedia, and Translate. You can also choose the default action that's performed when selecting a word.
Foliate 1.4.0 also includes a new alternative sidebar user interface, which incorporates the eBook chapters, bookmarks and annotations:
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| The new Foliate sidebar (for this screenshot I'm using its built-in dark theme) |
Other changes included with Foliate 1.4.0:
- Ability to find within only the current chapter
- Experimental popup footnote support
- Fixed CPU spikes when left open
- Fixed highlights not rendering at the correct positions
What's more, the minimum GJS version has been lowered with this release to version 1.52, so now Foliate can run on Ubuntu 18.04 without having to install it from Flathub. A DEB package is also provided with this release.
Download Foliate eBook reader
Foliate can be installed from Flathub, which works on most Linux distributions. To be able to install the Foliate package from Flathub on Linux, see the Flatpak quick setup page and follow the instructions from there, then visit the Foliate Flathub page and click the install button. If you're a Gnome user, you can also search for it on Gnome Software / Ubuntu Software and install it from there. On Linux Mint 19.x, which has Flathub enabled by default, you can directly search for Foliate in your Software app and install it from there.
The Foliate webpage also includes instructions for installing Foliate using distro-specific packages on Arch Linux, Fedora and Void Linux.
For recent Debian, Ubuntu (18.04+) and Linux Mint (19.x) versions, you may also download and install Foliate as a DEB package.
