this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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[–] Sub_dermal@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I personally use Zathura, it's minimalistic and uses VIM bindings.

But if you want something feature-dense, with a way of organising your library, eReader integration, file converting and more, Calibre is pretty amazing (and the actual reader part of Calibre is quite nice to use in my opinion).

[–] hedge@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hmmm . . . I can't get Calibre to open a PDF on Linux. Any suggestions?

[–] Sub_dermal@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you add the pdf to your Calibre library and open it or did you open it from somewhere else?

[–] hedge@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi, sorry for taking so long to get back--I right clicked on the PDF on my desktop, and told it to "open with (calibre) ebook viewer," at which point it just hangs and says "Preparing book for first read, please wait."

[–] Sub_dermal@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Maybe try opening Calibre proper and adding the pdf to your library first? It should work the way you're doing it, not sure why it's hanging like that - unless there's a problem with your Library location?

[–] BinaryEnthusiast@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Huh ok, I’ll have to give zathura a peek. Sounds interesting

Yeah I love calibre. I use it to manage my main library on my server, in addition to calibre-web for managing my front end. It’s really good at managing a ton of ebooks

[–] hedge@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do calibre or zathura have the ability to remove and rearrange pdf pages?

[–] mifuyne@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you need a tool to remove and rearrange PDF pages, maybe give PDF Arranger a try? https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger

[–] hedge@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks! Will definitely take a look. Was kind of hoping for a "one-stop shopping" all in one PDF reader, which is why I use MasterPDF, tho it's not open source 🙁

[–] black_mouflon@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
[–] kkaosninja@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Personally I use SumatraPDF.

Can read both PDFs, ePubs and even the djvu format. And its really lightweight, unlike the bloated monster that is Adobe Reader.

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[–] everett@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

KOReader, though most people will probably find the UI off-putting at first.

Thing is, it's perfect for use on an e-ink device, which is what's it's primarily designed for. The desktop (Linux and Mac) and Android versions are just icing on the cake, and they all work the same and can sync reading activity between them. Tons of features, options for tweaking book layouts, plugins for integration with other services, some integration with Calibre, etc. It takes the "kitchen sink" approach and I love it. I've found spending the time to learn it to be really rewarding.

[–] DandalfTheWhite@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use BookFusion. It’s a paid service but syncs the library and progress across platforms. Integrated with Calibre too, which I saw you mentioned you use in a different comment. Works great for me, but good luck finding something that works for you.

[–] BinaryEnthusiast@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Ok that’s super interesting. That is much cleaner than my current way of downloading my books to my iPad, so I’ll have to check that out and see how easy it is to integrate

[–] mifuyne@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is BookFusion a FOSS project with a paid service? I looked on their site and see no mention of it being FOSS.

[–] DandalfTheWhite@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh,I think you’re right. They have their Calibre plug-in which is open source I think but I think in my head I conflated that with the whole app. My bad.

[–] mifuyne@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

S'all good, I wanted to make sure 😀

[–] stdoutstderr@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Foliate is an excellent ebook reader in my opinion

[–] BinaryEnthusiast@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

That looks very clean, and I like the fact that you can have bookmarks and other QOL features with it. I may have to take a peek at that one as well

[–] hedge@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Can Foliate handle PDFs? Doesn't look like it from their website . . .

[–] InstallGentoo_@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago
[–] polymachine@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

On Windows is really enjoy sumatra ofr how simple it is.

[–] tubbadu@lemmy.kde.social 1 points 1 year ago

I use Okular from the KDE suite and it can literally view everything you can think of

There is also okular-mobile that is optimized for touchscreen use, it's a bit buggy but it works

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

I recently removed my PDF reader and use Firefox to read PDFs. For that, I created a new Firefox user account, set it up accordingly (with a few dedicated addons, plus making manual CSS changes to the user interface). Then I created a script (in Linux) to run a file or url with this user account instead, associated the script as the default application for the .pdf file format.

Script: firefox-reader

#!/bin/sh
exec firefox --profile ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxx.reader -- "${@}"

To create a new profile, you can run Firefox with the commandline option firefox --ProfileManager. The rest is pretty much self explanatory in my opinion.

[–] thatonedude1210@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used to use Foxit on Windows. I'm on Linux now, and I cannot recommend Okular enough.

[–] furrowsofar@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I hate to say it because I am a Cinnamon/Gnome/GTK guy, but I think Okular may be the best Linux reader. I think it can do form filling too.

For normal use I use Firefox, but if I needed something different Okular is one place I would look pretty quickly. I have used it in the past for more tricky things. Well I'd probably look evince and be disappointed first, then move on to Okular.

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