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Pool-Of-Tears / Myne

An android app to download & read ebooks from Project Gutenberg, built with Jetpack Compose.
https://pooloftears.in
Apache License 2.0
1.09k stars 63 forks source link

Switch to webview for ebook reader #152

Closed starry-shivam closed 5 months ago

starry-shivam commented 5 months ago

Currently, the app renders EPUB files by parsing the contents inside the OEBPS directory. However, parsing EPUB files is never entirely reliable because many EPUB files out there do not follow the standard EPUB structure and may not include a table of contents (toc.ncx) file or navMap properties. Fortunately, Gutenberg's books do follow proper EPUB 3 structure and include a toc.ncx file, which is why the EPUB reader works well for books available within Myne. However, due to the aforementioned reasons, it's not reliable at all and often breaks when opening some random EPUB file that is poorly built and doesn't follow proper file structure or lacks navigation-related properties.

The only solution to this issue is switching to a WebView for rendering EPUB files. This solves all of the parsing-related problems because then we skip parsing entirely and directly render the xhtml/html files in the WebView.

starry-shivam commented 5 months ago

So, After trying a bunch of libraries and WebView (see issue-152 branch), I couldn't really find a single EPUB parsing library that isn't decades old since its last update, or documentation and implementation for modern Jetpack Compose apps that is not very hard or even possible. I don't really have time right now to build yet another EPUB parser of my own and test 50 different edge cases. I guess I'll just try to improve the current implementation for now.