Thorium Reader overview

Thorium Reader is an easy to use EPUB reading application for Windows 10/10S, MacOS and Linux. After importing e-books from a directory or OPDS feed, you'll be able to read on any screen size, customize layout settings, navigate via the table of contents or page list, set bookmarks ... A great care is taken to ensure the accessibility of the application for visual impaired people using NVDA, JAWS or Narrator.

Free application. No ads. No private data flowing anywhere. Thorium is available in many languages and is accessible for visually impaired and dyslexic people.

This project is in constant evolution, corrections and new features will be added soon and your support is welcome for that. The application is based on the open-source Readium Desktop toolkit.

What’s new in version 2.3.0

Updated on Aug 07 2023

New and updated translations: Bulgarian, Greek, Croatian, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal).
Reader / image zoom: major feature update from initial proof of concept, better user experience (finger touch, trackpad gestures, mouse wheel, keyboard), support for raster/bitmap images as well as SVG markup.
Reader / MathML: native rendering in Chromium (Electron v25), Thorium 2.2.0 included a version of Chromium that did not support MathML natively (MathJax was the only way to display MathML).
Reader / MathML: MathJax dynamic aria-label (speech text) is overridden by authored alt-text (if present), Thorium TTS readaloud speaks it, screen readers do too but have the option to dig further / deeper into the MathML structure (useful with screen reader specialised plugins).
Reader / navigation history: hyperlink activation now correctly sets the landmark for previous/next navigation.
Reader / text display: fixed left/right/justify text alignement ("start" can be left or right depending on document language), "automatic" is now "default" with changed SVG icon to avoid confusion.
Reader / UX: finger swipe gesture can now be used to turn pages (requires touch screen).
Reader text selection: double-click now works (bookmarks label for now, later in upcoming annotations feature).
Reader / TTS: fixed aria-label support on img (alongside alt attribute), epub:type pagebreak (and role doc- prefix), title/label takes precedence over inner text, same with links. NOTE: this will need future update to match W3C specifications for computation of accessible label and description.
Reader / TTS: fixed voice selection based on user choice + language match (for example: fr-FR vs. fr-CA variants, en-US vs. en-UK, user wins over authored lang).
Reader / TTS: fixed paused / stopped state in playback controls.
Reader / TTS: fixed support for Japanese ruby, RT markup is now ignored.
Reader / TTS: captions / simplified view, initial text without active word boundary was not escaped (ampersand character).
Reader / Popup footnotes: fixed handling of SVG a@href links.
Reader / HTML5 audio: fixed visible controls visibility.
Reader / EPUB: navigator.epubReadingSystem object injection in iframes (including SVG).
Reader / EPUB: FXL fixed-layout rendition-prefixed page-spread-left/center/right properties on spine item, was only parsing non-prefixed variant.
Reader / Media Overlays: fixed click on non-synchronised HTML element which now preserves current playback location / timestamp (was reseting to begining of document).
Reader / UX: mouse middle-click was causing opening in external Electron window.
DAISY: fixed v2.02 and v3.0 import of ncc.html or *.opf, now works when loading from non-zipped publications.
OPDS: feed entry fallback cascade was too permissive (publication info was incorrectly fetching borrow/buy links in some cases).
OPDS: fixed "search" relative URLs in OPDS1(XML) and OPDS2(JSON), fixed URI Templates curly brace escaping in URL path.
OPDS: fixed publication title which was not displayed.
OPDS: added display of accessibility metadata.
GUI: fixed dark/night and sepia modes in audiobook playback rate chooser and TTS + Media Overlays rate/voice choosers.
GUI: fixed edge-case of auto-focus fail on default dialog button (e.g. invoking the delete action from the popup menu was failing to auto-focus the default ok button, whereas this worked when reaching the same modal dialog prompt via the publication info sheet).
GUI / accessibility: improved keyboard shortcuts editor usability, for both screen reader and keyboard users
GUI / UX: improved error message during file import, unsupported extension / document type.
TTS: now enabled by default on Linux (Electron command line parameter "enable-speech-dispatcher").

Information

License

Free

Size

111.1 MB

Developer’s website

https://www.edrlab.org/software/thorium-reader/

Downloads

476

App requirements

Intel 64
macOS 10.13 or later

Thorium Reader