Emre Tolga Kaptan

Backend & full-stack developer · Wrocław · open to work

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Emre Tolga Kaptan — Software developer

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simPl Reader

A native offline reader for PDF, EPUB, HTML, text and Markdown. It is written in Rust for Windows x64, and an Android app uses the same core.

simPl Reader's library in the dark theme: books in progress under Continue Reading, and a shelf of covers below.
The library, dark theme
Role
Software developer
Built with
Rust, Iced, tiny-skia, PDFium, Android
Status
v0.1.5 released for Windows x64, Android MVP

What it does

It keeps a local library, remembers where you stopped, and has a minimal interface with light and dark themes. It saves highlights, notes and bookmarks with your books, and everything works offline.

  • Two ways to read PDFs: the original page (Document view) or reconstructed prose with extracted illustrations (Book view).
  • Stable page numbers: zooming changes the page size, never its number or the total.
  • Read aloud with Windows' installed voices, following the spoken line across pages and chapters.
  • Offline word lookup with 13 optional dictionary directions, downloaded only when you need them.
  • Verified library backup and restore; export of bookmarks, quotes and notes as Markdown, text or JSON.

Engineering notes

The interface is native. It uses Iced with a CPU renderer and no embedded browser or WebView. PDF Book view rebuilds prose from the PDF's existing text layer (no OCR) and caches each conversion, so switching views and reopening a book are fast.

The app stores reading data in the user's profile, separate from the executable. Restore verifies the archive first, shows a review, and keeps the previous profile in a recovery folder. The app verifies dictionary packages, which total under 20 MB, and decompresses only the active direction.