Features

Comfort adapts the page by itself — margins and spacing follow the screen and the font — and keeps one slim bar at the bottom: back to the library, the settings, search, the progress. Colour and light, face and size, page and animation live in one popup (Esc Esc, or F9).

Professional is the full reader: panels in docks and in windows of their own, feature themes, translation, reading aloud and fine-grained settings. Switch at any time: each mode’s settings have a door to the other. The modes are independent — set Comfort to dark ochre for evening reading and Professional to daylight and the Terminal theme.

Themes are more than color schemes. Each defines background, text color, progress bar tint, and bookmark marker palette. The Featured ones go further — they bring their own typeface, signature frames, and custom progress indicators built into the theme’s identity, not just a color tweak.

• Palettes Five families — Neutral, Ochre, Celestial, Lime, Rose — each with seven tonal variations: a pure-white extreme on the left, five mid tones in between, and a pure-black extreme on the right. The extremes carry the palette’s signature color in saturated text on plain white or black — built for full sun on a beach or pitch-dark bedrooms.
• Featured Typewriter (ivory + dark brown, light and dark variants, opening in American Typewriter — leans into a quiet steampunk vibe with a brass dashboard speedometer whose needle rolls as you read, swapped for a vintage radio-dial carriage with a lit red pointer on narrower screens; copper-rim keycaps; mechanical drum-counter read-outs) and Terminal (white monospace on deep blue, locked to Menlo / Courier New, Norton Commander homage). Both come with their own independent typography and layout settings.
• CustomThree user-defined slots with full color picker control
• Day & Night mode Assign separate themes for light and dark system appearance — automatic or manually overridden

The reader carries three independent appearance contexts — Regular, Typewriter, and Terminal. Each remembers its own font, size, line height, padding, alignment, and navigation mode, so a tweak made inside Terminal won’t follow you back to Ochre.

Turn the Desk on (the Desk tab of Reader Appearance) and the page gets a backing — a sheet raised above a quiet desk, with air around the text. The eye rests on the margins, and the book reads calmer. Keep the sheet’s proportions free or snap them to A4, Letter or Book; the author, title and series are printed right on the margins, and in two-page mode the sheet unfolds into a spread.

• Desk surfaces A quiet tone, a texture — dark wood, oiled teak, travertine, leather, slate, brushed metal — a blueprint grid, a grid tinted live in your current theme’s color, or your own wallpaper. With frosted glass, your desktop glows softly through the surface.
• Tuned to taste Margin widths, corner radius, elevation shadow, translucency and frosted glass, desk contrast, book info placement — all on sliders in the Theme panel.
• Turn pages from the margins The desk around the page turns pages: forward on the right and bottom, back on the left and top — like leafing through a real book.

The page can carry a texture — lined, squared, millimetre, sand, or a picture of your own — read as grain, so it takes the theme’s colour.

A frame around the text — single, double, notched or vintage — follows the padding and the columns; the Typewriter’s Perforated frame gives fan-fold sheets with sprocket strips.

All system fonts — no downloads, no licensing, no rendering differences between devices.

• SerifGeorgia, Palatino, Charter, Iowan Old Style
• Sans-serifHelvetica Neue, SF Pro, Avenir Next
• MonospaceMenlo on Mac, Courier New on iOS; American Typewriter everywhere

The font picker groups them with labeled sections and applies your choice to the page instantly. Where the typeface supports them, you also get weights — thin, regular, and bold.

• Size12 to 48 pixels
• Line heightContinuously adjustable, from tight to spacious
• Paragraph spacingContinuously adjustable from 0.3 to 2.4 em
• Text indentToggle first-line indentation
• AlignmentLeft, justified, or right
• HyphenationAutomatic when justified, with content-based language detection for Latin, Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic, and Greek scripts
• Page paddingContinuous slider from edge-to-edge to generous margins
• Image displayShow, mask (reveal on hover), or hide entirely

Every setting applies instantly — no page reload, no position lost.

The default reader renders the book as a single continuous page — no artificial breaks, just smooth vertical scrolling.

Switch to Page mode for a paginated experience with animated or instant page turns. Page separators are configurable — clean lines or a soft shadow. On Mac and iPad (in landscape), Two pages mode renders a classic book spread. All three modes preserve your exact position when switching.

In Pages mode the text splits into up to four columns on a wide screen — a two-page spread is columns at two, and a wide Mac window holds three or four, like a newspaper. The count is a ceiling: the page settles how many fit.

Page turns come in four effects — or none: Slide, Flip (the leaf turns over, two columns), Cards (every column revolves about its own axis) and Sink (the old page sinks into the paper, the new one lands from the side). Typewriter has a carriage feed of its own.

Manga, comics and scanned albums read as pages: CBZ, CBR, fixed-layout EPUB and a PDF imported as pages. Manga goes right to left in spreads with the cover on its own, as in a printed volume; the direction comes from the file and can be changed on the book card and in the reader. In Comfort a book of pictures has settings of its own: a tint in the theme’s colour and the page’s brightness for the night.

Any page opens full screen and zooms — a pinch about the point between the fingers, ⌘ with the scroll wheel, a double click or tap. On the Mac a double F12 opens a grid of every page with a size slider, and scrubbing the position bar shows the page or spread you will land on. A book that is too large gets a size dialog that offers to make its pictures smaller.

Bookmarks, notes, search, translation, chapters and pictures are panels. Each one lives where you put it, and the whole frame around the page is yours to arrange — for any screen size and any habit:

• Dock to any edgeBottom, top, left or right — several panels share a dock as tabs
• Floating panelA panel in its own window, over the page or beside it
• Hidden until its keyA panel you never use leaves no tab behind — its key brings it back
• Ready-made layoutsEverything along the bottom, everything down one side, or navigation on the right — one choice moves every panel; three slots keep your own
• Pin a dockThe page gives it the room for good; a panel is always open there

Reader Appearance is six tabs — Typography, Page & Navigation, Theme, Desk, Panels, Shortcuts — and a double F9 opens a navigator that jumps to any of them. A double Esc hides the open panels; a second one opens the panel selector, every panel with its key. H is Quiet mode: the chrome fades until you touch a key.

Your reading position is tracked more precisely than most readers bother with — which means it survives:

• Font changesSize, family, line height
• Window resizesFull layout reflow
• Device switchesMac to iPad, iPad to iPhone — ContinuousReader with sync enabled
• Mode switchesScroll to page, page to spread
• Long absencesReopening the book weeks later with different settings

When you return to a book, the reader fades in at the exact paragraph you left, not the nearest chapter.

One caveat: settings that change how many pages a book has — font size, line height, paragraph spacing, two-page spread — can nudge the exact spot by a line or two. The reader anchors to the first paragraph visible on screen, so you keep your place even when the page count shifts under it.

The navigation panel shows your place the way you like: a full progress line, just the percent, a segmented bar or a dial. The reading line itself can sit on any edge of the page, float on the desk, or separate the pages of a spread. Click or tap it to open the drawer:

• Tapered sliderA custom track that’s thick for the part you’ve read and hair-thin for what’s ahead, with a smooth S-curve at your current position
• Entry markerA dot with a dashed ring showing where you started this session
• Marker modesSwitch the track to show chapters, images, bookmarks, or nothing. Chapter markers show titles on hover. Image markers show thumbnail previews.
• Go ToA page or a percent — and the text at that place shows before you jump, as it does for chapters and bookmarks

Bookmark markers are color-coded and show preview text and page number on hover.

Chapter structure is extracted on import — with proper heading priority and scene-break separator filtering (* * *, ---, etc.).

The Chapters panel (F3) jumps to any chapter with one click. It has three shapes:

• Chapter listA static list with the current chapter highlighted and bolded
• Chapter map Proportional variable-height rows — taller rows for longer chapters — with a thin left rail track, a sliding thumb, and a viewport-proportional indicator. Page numbers are hidden in map mode for a cleaner spatial view.
• FilmstripChapters as frames along the dock or a column at its side, the part you have read tinted; arrow keys move along them, Return opens the chapter

And the Pictures panel (F12) lines every illustration up along the dock: Space shows one at full size, Return takes you to it in the text.

Add a bookmark with Cmd+B or via the text selection context menu. The app captures your selected text as a preview, or — if nothing is selected — the first visible paragraph.

• Seven colorsTo categorize bookmarks (last-used color is remembered)
• NotesAttached to any bookmark
• Filter bookmarks by colorAppears when a book has two or more bookmark colors
• Highlights in the textEach bookmark tints its passage in the book — as if marked with a highlighter, in its own color
• Live markersOn the progress bar, with tooltip previews
• Nearest bookmarkHighlighted in bold in the side panel as you read

Bookmarks live with the book, not with the app’s copy of it: close the book, bring the same file back later, and the marks are still there. All three apps have them.

Open in-book search from the Search panel or press Cmd+F. The results are a numbered list beside the field, the ones visible on the page highlighted — you always know where you are among them. Case-sensitive toggle, yellow/orange highlights in the text, markers along the scrollbar.

Search is a panel like the others — docked to an edge, floating, or hidden until its key — not a window that covers the text.

On iPhone search is a full-screen sheet with the same list of results, and it keeps them while you read on.

Each book has a personal notes field with a rich text editor. The formatting toolbar supports bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, H1–H3 headings, bullet and numbered lists, blockquotes, horizontal rules, and four highlight colors (yellow, green, blue, pink). On iPhone, the toolbar splits into two rows to fit everything without scrolling.

Notes are stored with full formatting and rendered the same way in the side panel and in exported reports.

On iPhone the page is always full screen: text flows under the Dynamic Island in scroll mode, and each page is a clean rectangle in paged mode. The bar with the clock, the progress and the battery is a setting, on by default. On iPad, tap the centre of the page to enter or leave full screen.

Two active corners: the bottom-left opens the quick settings — theme, font, size, the page sheet — and the bottom-right opens navigation: bookmarks, chapters, search, pictures and notes as tiles. Neither leaves the page.

In the Comfort reader the phone keeps things simpler: one corner, one menu with the navigation and settings tiles together, one settings screen — and the Comfort | Professional switch at its foot.

Going to a page or a percent shows the text at that place before you jump. The strip along the top edge starts text selection: page turning pauses, and a panel offers a bookmark, a translation, a search in the book or a note for what you selected.

Optional pixel-art clock shows the time as dotted numerals on the background of the page — adjustable position and contrast, visible enough to check at a glance, unobtrusive enough to ignore while reading. For anyone who’s ever lost track of time in a book and missed their stop.

Or a small island indicator floating at the bottom — clock and reading progress over a darker pill background.

Or a thin bottom bar version — clock and progress across the full width of the screen. The clock comes in the style you pick — a seven-segment one included.

The bar is yours to assemble: a builder for the island and the bar with a set of readings for every slot — session time, four kinds of clock, four of battery, four of position in the book — and a live preview.

Highlight any word or phrase. Its translation appears in a panel along the bottom of the screen and stays out of the way while you read on. It never covers the text or pulls you out of the page — no popup, nothing to dismiss.

Three display modes in the panel:

• Translation onlyJust the translated text, maximally compact
• Side by sideSource and translation next to each other
• DictionaryA short selection comes back as a centered look-up in the reading font, instead of the original — each word under its source

Switch modes in the toolbar, or set your preferred default in settings.

• Many target languagesProvided by Apple’s on-device Translation framework
• Nothing leaves your deviceAll translation happens locally
• Selection menu reorderingTranslate and Bookmark sit at the top of the right-click / long-press menu by default. Reorder them in settings — whichever you reach for more often goes first.
• Manual modeA field of your own: type or paste any text and it is translated as you pause; the selection can be pasted in

Every word you look up can be remembered. ContinuousReader tracks:

• LanguagesThe languages you translate between, with frequencies
• Words seen beforeWith counts
• BooksWhere you translated the most
• Time-based activityWhen and how often you reach for translation

Tracking can be toggled any time. Turn it off and nothing is recorded. Turn it on and export the full history as an HTML report — useful for language learners, researchers, and translators.

Future: export to Anki or other flash-card formats, if there’s demand.

Built-in text-to-speech that reads from your current position. Not a separate mode — an extension of the same reading session.

• Position sync on openThe voice reader matches the paragraph you were visually on
• Position sync on closeThe visual reader scrolls to the paragraph the voice finished
• Word-by-word highlightingA soft rounded indicator glides from word to word, automatically keeping the current paragraph scrolled into view
• Transport controlsPlay/pause, skip forward/back, elapsed time, paragraph counter
• Adjustable speedContinuous slider with real-time effect — change speed mid-sentence and playback picks up from the exact word, not the nearest paragraph
• Pitch and voiceInline pitch slider, voice picker with Auto language detection or manual selection. Disabled during playback to prevent disruption — pause, adjust, resume.
• Theme integrationAll controls, progress bar, and word highlight use your current reader theme colors

• EPUBWith chapter extraction and embedded image handling; fixed-layout EPUB reads as pages
• FB2 / FB2.ZIPWith automatic genre code mapping (158 codes)
• MOBIVia a native decompressor
• HTML / HTML.ZIPWith HTML sanitization and encoding detection
• TXT / TXT.ZIPWith encoding detection
• RTF / RTF.ZIPStreaming parser
• DOC / DOCXWord documents (Mac)
• AZW3Kindle books without DRM
• Markdown.md and .markdown, headings as chapters
• CBZ / CBRComics and manga in ZIP or RAR, read as pages
• PDFAs text or as pages

Embedded images are extracted, compressed to JPEG under 500KB at max 1200px, and stored alongside the content. Importing images is your choice, per book — on by default, off if the author overdoes it or you want to save space (the choice is remembered). Once imported, images in the reader can be shown, masked (revealed on hover), or hidden entirely.

Import a PDF as text: the app takes the paragraphs out of the file, and the book behaves like any other, with fonts, themes, columns and translation. Complex formatting is lost, so tables, formulas and multi-column layouts come out poorly. Or import it as pages: every page becomes a picture, exactly as in the file, and the PDF reads like manga.

Before the import a wizard shows the book as it will be, with the settings to adjust; Convert Again… on the book card redoes it with others. A password-protected PDF is recognised and declined at once, with a suggestion to remove the password first.

A zip or RAR with one book opens as that book. With several, a browser shows them with the archive’s folders and a preview of the chosen book — its first page or its cover — and works from the keyboard. ContinuousReader and PlainReader take several of them, or all, as one batch with the same settings; on the Mac, Mass Import and the download basket take archives of books too.

• BrowseNative file picker with filter for all supported extensions
• URLPaste a download link and the app fetches, validates, and imports the file
• Drag and dropDrop a file onto the library. Or drag a URL straight from your browser’s address bar — the book is fetched and the import dialog opens with metadata, cover, and author already filled in. You skip the copy-paste-open-import-paste-fetch dance, but you still see the book before it joins the library.

On Mac, the import dialog has a persistent tab switcher (This Mac / URL / Drop) remembered between sessions.

In JustReader, importing replaces the current book. In ContinuousReader, books join the library.

Import an existing collection in one pass (macOS). Point ContinuousReader at folders and files and it converts everything at once.

• What you drag is what landsThe source directory tree becomes nested virtual folders, merging into folders that already exist
• Choose the destinationThe current folder, the library root, or any folder — the structure nests under your choice, or books go straight in
• Duplicates marked before anything is writtenMatched by author and title, so re-importing a collection won’t pile up copies
• Color tag and imagesApply a color tag and choose whether to keep cover images and inline illustrations
• Drag and dropDrop a folder or several files onto the library to start it; a single file opens the regular import dialog
• Summary at the endHow many imported, folders created, duplicates skipped, total size, and any errors

When you import a book into ContinuousReader, you can set its metadata before it enters the library:

• Duplicate detectionAgainst the existing library, showing where the duplicate already lives
• Cover previewShown from the book’s own metadata — replaceable later from the Book Card
• Metadata previewDetected title, author, series, publication date, language
• Color tagAssignment
• Genre chip pickerManual genre editing
• Folder assignmentContext-aware — uses the current folder when browsing one, otherwise none
• Where it came fromRemembered, so a catalog can mark a book you already have
• Image inclusion toggleFor FB2/EPUB/MOBI (strip images if you prefer text-only)
• Open after importCheckbox

JustReader skips this dialog — pick a file, start reading.

• 5 MBWarning banner, import proceeds
• 50 MBLarge-file threshold on Mac (30 / 60 MB on iPhone / iPad) — you can import anyway, or without images
• 100 MBDecompressed-size threshold for ZIP / EPUB archives (75 / 150 MB on iPhone / iPad)

Browse online book catalogs in a tab of the library on the Mac and the iPad, or a sheet on the iPhone.

• Default catalogsProject Gutenberg, Ebooks libres et gratuits and textos.info are ready to use — add any other OPDS server yourself
• Custom catalogsAdd your own OPDS server with Basic Auth support
• Feed navigationWith breadcrumb trail and middle truncation for long paths
• Server-side searchUsing the catalog’s OpenSearch template when available
• Local filter At the top of every feed — instantly filters visible items by title, author, or summary as you type
• Cover thumbnailsWith native caching
• "In Library" badgeFor books already imported
• Batch import queue With folder assignment, color tags, and format selection
• Single import With post-import options

Three features that make OPDS browsing more than a one-time lookup.

• ShortcutsBookmark any feed for one-click navigation. Useful for favorite author pages, series, or collections.
• WatchersTrack series or author feeds for new entries — toggle an eye on any acquisition feed. The Watchers tab shows what each one found, what you already have and what you chose to ignore, as a table or as cards, with filters that reach into the books; import the new ones from there.
• Download basketDrop or paste a list of links into File ▸ Mass Download from URLs. The app fetches them one after another, tries again after a failure or a dropped connection, and imports each book into the folder you choose.