Freda

Freda is a free program for reading electronic books (eBooks) on Windows Mobile devices. It is now available also on Android devices.

Features

Windows 8

• Reads ePub (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books
• Customizable controls, fonts and colors
• Integrates with on-line catalogs - Feedbooks, SmashWords, Gutenberg ...
• Links to your Calibre book library

Windows phone

• Reads ePub (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books
• Customizable controls, fonts and colors
• Bookmarks and annotations
• Integrates with on-line catalogs - Feedbooks, SmashWords, Gutenberg ...
• Connects to your DropBox account for downloading book files
• Links to your Calibre book library
• Can download books from any website using an in-application browser
• Share comments, likes and dislikes using twitter, facebook or email

Windows Mobile

• Compatible with Windows Mobile versions 6, 5 and 2003
• Reads ePub (DRM-free), HTML and TXT format books
• Touch screen interface
• Works with all screen dimensions and orientations
• Customizable controls, fonts and colors
• Dictionary look-up
• Bookmarks and annotations

Android

• For Android phones.

update 4.36

3rd September 2020: Change Log

• Render PDF files, displaying the pages as PNG images, using the built-in Windows and Android PDF components.
• Better fallback logic for cases where the advanced parser barfs; first try simplified layout, then try flattened – which should basically just emit the text without formatting or aligning it in any way at all
• Fix 'float' and 'clear' logic to align better with CSS standards (e.g. force a move below the float(s) in response to an applicable 'clear'). Generally trying to do the best job I can, without (yet) implementing the Block Formatting Context in all its gory horror.
• Better handling of block elements embedded inside inline elements.
• Better treatment of start-of-paragraph in justified text.
• (Android) Ask for permission when it's required for storage card access / save log file / backup (save/restore/merge)
• BUG FIX: When the Mobi-parser (or any other thing) creates an epub having elements with HTML that sets width and height attributes, ignore these, unless they are on images. Such attributes should only be set by CSS not by HTML.
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fix an issue with multi-line text boxes – where keyboard characters like []{}\|’@#~ were getting ignored.
• BUG FIX: Fix odd behaviour (and some stack overflow crashes) with getting/selecting paragraphs, sentences and sections, including when this is done by the 'read aloud' function.
• BUG FIX: ‘Read Aloud’ function now starts at the beginning of the selected text (a regression bug meant that it was starting from the start of the paragraph instead)
• (Windows) BUG FIX: Fixed an issue where the BookReaderPage menu ribbons would get into in a funny state, where they can’t be popped out (because they immediately close again).

update 3.7

November 11, 2020

• Implemented CSS ‘position’ attribute values ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’.
• Implemented CSS attribute background-image: url("path/to/image.ext").
• Forced the read-aloud language code to always be just two letters (so EN-AU becomes EN for instance), which avoids the issue that a possibly reasonable language is getting left off the list of available languages.
• ‘text-to-speech applies emphasis’ is an optional setting, default no. Because Microsoft’s default voices produce an idiotic drawl when reading emphasised text.
• ‘text-to-speech pronounces image descriptions’ is an optional setting, default yes. Because sometimes a book has all sorts of rubbish in images’ alt-text, and we don’t want to hear it read out.
• Implemented ‘advanced rendering’ behaviour for TXT and FB2 books, so that the CFI-saving of bookmarks works for them too (I will eventually want to get rid of the legacy rendering mode altogether – and need to be forward-compatible with this change).
• For Android only (because Windows UWP apps don't have multiple TTS engines), added a dropdown to choose which text-to-speech engine will be used, if there are several of them installed.
• PDF pages can optionally have their margins trimmed (i.e. cut down to the rectangle containing non-white pixels).
• Implemented a special ‘settings to use for this book only’ preset. It appears in the preset list, with a name like "for current book" which you can save settings to, or load (if you wanted to restore some setting you'd changed). When you come to re-open the book, Freda looks to see whether you've previously saved a "for current book" preset for it, and if so, Freda will load it. [potential gotcha – there’s no easy way to make this preset ‘unload’ when you subsequently aren’t reading this particular book]
• Image viewer: Now provides a ‘rotate 90 degrees’ button, and on Windows, a full-screen view and add accessible controls / buttons for zoom in/out and pan.
• Added a setting to tell text-to-speech to 'skip' some characters (noting that ~ * _ seem to be particularly annoying).
• When a ‘folder’ or ‘storage card’ book source is created, it now gets a default label that’s localised into the right language. [note: storage card exists only on Android]
• Bug Fix: The code for squeezing table columns to fit their content is not working (it's giving up when floats were present, failing to account for margin/padding on image elements … )
• Bug Fix: (Android) Windows-1251 and 1252 encodings are not working (it needed a change to the .NET build options for the project, to make it work in Release builds)
• Bug Fix: Read-aloud is failing to proceed to the next chapter in some cases (in fact, when the chapter begins with a paragraph consisting only of non-selectable ‘formatting’ images.
• Bug Fix: The margin of left-floating elements is applied wrongly to the ‘float formatting context’ meaning that it can over-write the content that is meant to be floating round it to the right.
• Bug Fix: The width of a floated image should default to the actual width of the image in the file, rather than the layout-width of the block containing it.
• Bug Fix: (Windows) When GoogleDrive redirects to an app-specific URL in its auth workflow, it uses the same URL for Freda, Freda+ and Freda-Chinese. So if more than one of them is installed, the results will be random, and not very nice. The three apps should use three different uri schemes.

For more information

• Freda home page
• Android play store
• MobileRead thread for Freda covers windows and android versions.