This is the base framework for creating document readers like Koreader, an e-ink device oriented reader application for various document formats.

It's using the muPDF library (see http://mupdf.com/), djvulibre library, CREngine library, libk2pdfopt library and it is scripted using Lua (see http://www.lua.org/). To gain good speed at that, it uses the LuaJIT compiler.

It all started as the KindlePDFviewer application, which has since been greatly enhanced and now reflects this in having a new name, Koreader.

The application is licensed under the GPLv3 (see COPYING file).

Follow these steps:

• fetch thirdparty sources

  • manually fetch all the thirdparty sources:

    • install muPDF sources into subfolder "mupdf"
    • install muPDF third-party sources (see muPDF homepage) into a new subfolder "mupdf/thirdparty"
    • install libDjvuLibre sources into subfolder "djvulibre"
    • install CREngine sources into subfolder "kpvcrlib/crengine"
    • install LuaJit sources into subfolder "luajit-2.0"
    • install popen_noshell sources into subfolder "popen-noshell"
    • install libk2pdfopt sources into subfolder "libk2pdfopt"

  • automatically fetch thirdparty sources with Makefile:

    • make sure you have patch, wget, unzip, git and svn installed
    • run make fetchthirdparty.

• adapt Makefile to your needs

• run make thirdparty. This will build MuPDF (plus the libraries it depends on), libDjvuLibre, CREngine, libk2pdfopt and LuaJIT.

• run make. This will build the koreaderbase application which is a Lua interpreter offering the koreader-base API to Lua scripts.

Ccache can speed up recompilation by caching previous compilations and detecting when the same compilation is being done again. In other words, it will decrease build time when the source have been built. Ccache support has been added to KOReader's build system. Before using it, you need to install a ccache in your system.

• in ubuntu use:sudo apt-get install ccache
• in fedora use:sudo yum install ccache
• install from source:
  • get latest ccache source from http://ccache.samba.org/download.html
  • unarchieve the source package in a directory
  • cd to that directory and use:./configure && make && sudo make install
• after using ccache, make a clean build will only take 15sec. Enjoy!
• to disable ccache, use export USE_NO_CCACHE=1 before make.
• for more detail about ccache. visit:

http://ccache.samba.org

The code also features a device emulation. You need SDL headers and library for this. It allows to develop on a standard PC and saves precious development time. It might also compose the most unfriendly desktop PDF reader, depending on your view.

If you are using Fedora Core Linux, do yum install SDL SDL-devel. If you are using Ubuntu, install libsdl-dev1.2 package.

To build in "emulation mode", you need to run make like this:

make clean cleanthirdparty
EMULATE_READER=1 make thirdparty koreader-base

By default emulator will provide a resolution of 800x600. It can be changed at runtime by changing environment variables:

EMULATE_READER_W=746 EMULATE_READER_H=1024 koreader-base