nov.el
provides a major mode for reading EPUB documents.
Features:
- Basic navigation (jump to TOC, previous/next chapter)
- Remembering and restoring the last read position
- Jump to next chapter when scrolling beyond end
- Renders EPUB2 (.ncx) and EPUB3 (<nav>) TOCs
- Hyperlinks to internal and external targets
- Supports textual and image documents
- View source of document files
- Metadata display
- Image rescaling
Set up the MELPA or MELPA Stable repository if you haven't already and
install with M-x package-install RET nov RET
.
Make sure you have an unzip
executable on PATH
, otherwise the
extraction of EPUB files will fail. If you for some reason have
unzip
in a non-standard location, customize nov-unzip-program
to its path. You'll also need an Emacs compiled with libxml2
support, otherwise rendering will fail.
Put the following in your init file:
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.epub\\'" . nov-mode))
While the defaults make for an acceptable reading experience, it can be improved with any of the following changes:
To change the default font, use M-x customize-face RET
variable-pitch
, pick a different family, save and apply. If you
dislike globally customizing that face, add the following to your init
file:
(defun my-nov-font-setup ()
(face-remap-add-relative 'variable-pitch :family "Liberation Serif"
:height 1.0))
(add-hook 'nov-mode-hook 'my-nov-font-setup)
To completely disable the variable pitch font, customize
nov-variable-pitch
to nil
. Text will be displayed with the
default face instead which should be using a monospace font.
By default text is filled by the window width. You can customize
nov-text-width
to a number of columns to change that:
(setq nov-text-width 80)
It's also possible to set it to a huge number to inhibit text filling,
this can be used in combination with visual-line-mode
and packages
such as visual-fill-column
to implement more flexible filling:
(setq nov-text-width most-positive-fixnum)
(setq visual-fill-column-center-text t)
(add-hook 'nov-mode-hook 'visual-line-mode)
(add-hook 'nov-mode-hook 'visual-fill-column-mode)
In case you're not happy with the rendering at all, you can either use
nov-pre-html-render-hook
and nov-post-html-render-hook
to
adjust the HTML before and after rendering or use your own rendering
function by customizing nov-render-html-function
to one that
replaces HTML in a buffer with something nicer than the default
output.
Here's an advanced example of text justification with the justify-kp package:
(require 'justify-kp)
(setq nov-text-width most-positive-fixnum)
(defun my-nov-window-configuration-change-hook ()
(my-nov-post-html-render-hook)
(remove-hook 'window-configuration-change-hook
'my-nov-window-configuration-change-hook
t))
(defun my-nov-post-html-render-hook ()
(if (get-buffer-window)
(let ((max-width (pj-line-width))
buffer-read-only)
(save-excursion
(goto-char (point-min))
(while (not (eobp))
(when (not (looking-at "^[[:space:]]*$"))
(goto-char (line-end-position))
(when (> (shr-pixel-column) max-width)
(goto-char (line-beginning-position))
(pj-justify)))
(forward-line 1))))
(add-hook 'window-configuration-change-hook
'my-nov-window-configuration-change-hook
nil t)))
(add-hook 'nov-post-html-render-hook 'my-nov-post-html-render-hook)
This customization yields the following look:
Open the EPUB file with C-x C-f ~/novels/novel.epub
, scroll with
SPC
and switch chapters with n
and p
. More keybinds can
be looked up with F1 m
.
See CONTRIBUTING.rst.
The first one I've heard of is epubmode.el which is, well, see for yourself. You might find ereader more useful, especially if you're after Org integration and annotation support.