Lecture (French for reading) is a comic books and manga reader for cbz, cbr ant cbt.

It's been written in a very short delay (a few hours of a single day) so it's a really simple reader with, depending on opinion, the bare minimum or just enough features.

It's a one shot reader: it starts with a book and won't start without one. No menu, no book list, no database, not even thumbnails, just the book and a few shortcuts with an optional slider to ease browsing. That's it.

This is an open source/open minded projet, feel free to contribute, fork, fix, submit, ask, improve, suggest, criticise or build toasters with it as much as you want.

Lecture is licenced under the terms of the GPLv3 license.

Some parts, like the OPDS server, are licensed under the terms of the AGPLv3 license

Lecture's actually supported on Linux, Windows and OS X.

It'll soon be supported on iOS and most certainly Android but this requires a bit of work as there's no filesystem (as they say) on these architectures, meaning something like a bookshelf is required (which is going against the one shot thing...)

On Linux and Windows, the reader needs a book to start, so you can

• associate your .cb{z,r,t} with Lecture and double-click on them or

• use the command line:

  ./Lecture path/to/your/book.cb{z,r,t}

• or drop the book on Lecture executable

On OS X, same thing but the application can be started without a book. However, there's no menu on OS X either, so you'll have the same options as for Linux and Windows to open a book.

space/right	next page
backspace/left	previous page
home	1st page
end	last page
f (+cmd for OS X)	toggle full screen
s:	toggle slider
q (+cmd for OS X)	quit
cmd+w	close window (quit on Linux and Windows)
i	show some info on current page

• Luce
• Luce/Embedded
• libarchive
• a custom lua module for libarchive
• some bugs, most certainly

alpha release, probably buggy on any other desktop than mine.

(built with Luce/Embedded)

• Linux (x86_64/glibc 2.13, debian package)
• Linux (x86_64/glibc 2.13)
• Mac OS X (x86_64, 10.9, untested on previous releases)
• Windows (x86)

For Debian-like distro, there's a debian package.

For others, put the executable somewhere in your PATH.

There are also a .desktop and icons if you want to fully integrate with your window manager:

• drop Lecture.desktop in
  • /usr[/local]/share/applications/
  • or in $HOME/.local/share/applications/
• put Lecture.xpm and/or Lecture.png in
  • /usr[/local]/share/pixmaps/
  • or $HOME/.local/share/pixmaps/
• you can also create a menu entry with the follwing content in /usr/share/menu/Lecture

?package(Lecture): \
    needs="X11" \
    section="Applications/Graphics" \
    title="Lecture" \
    command="/usr/bin/Lecture" \
    icon="/usr/share/pixmaps/Lecture.xpm" \
    longtitle="Embedded Luce for Lecture"

• to associate with mime types, you can create the entry file

  • /usr[/local]/lib/mime/packages/Lecture.xml or
  • $HOME/.local/share/mime/Lecture.xml

  with the following contents:

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info">
      <mime-type type="application/x-cbz">
          <sub-class-of type="application/zip"/>
          <comment xml:lang="en">Comic Book Archive (Zip compressed)</comment>
          <glob pattern="*.cbz"/>
      </mime-type>
      <mime-type type="application/x-cbr">
          <sub-class-of type="application/x-rar"/>
          <comment xml:lang="en">Comic Book Archive (RAR compressed)</comment>
          <glob pattern="*.cbr"/> 
      </mime-type>
      <mime-type type="application/x-cbt">
          <sub-class-of type="application/x-compressed-tar"/>
          <sub-class-of type="application/x-bzip-compressed-tar"/>
          <sub-class-of type="application/x-tar"/>
          <comment xml:lang="en">Comic Book Archive (tar, possibly compressed)</comment>
          <glob pattern="*.cbt"/>
      </mime-type>
  </mime-info>

Drop Lecture.app in your /Applications folder.

Drop Lecture.exe wherever you want and open a comic book with Open with..., that should register the path.

• add "Open..." in menu for OS X
• rotate image
• add on screen help

• change reading way for manga (r -> l)
• re-open last open book
• open book on last read page
• bookmark pages
• show bookmarks on slider
• add support for epub

• add a bookshelf to open books
• add support for OPDS (both client and server)
• change brightness with up and down dragging (à la Stanza)
• add button to go back to menu on iOS

• remove book
• add tags to books
• add books to a serie (just a special tag)
• access series from a combo (à la CloudReaders)

All the requirements are included as submodules or included in sources.

It's fully configured to be built on a Linux host.

It's prepared for cross-compilation with Linux as a host and Windows, OS X and iOS as targets (see Luce/Embedded for details on cross compilers).

To build natively on other platforms, please refer to your IDE/OS manuals.

1. to create all the required links between repositories, run the script recreate_config.sh from the root of the project.
2. step into src/

3. run

   make linux

   or

   make all

   to build for all platforms (if you have followed the instructions from Luce/Embedded)