Customized Crosspoint for learning Japanese
I have been learning Japanese for a couple of years now, trying out many apps along the way.
Mostly, I have been reading on my phone or on my Boox, but I wanted something more portable with a better battery life that is easier on the eyes.
The forks I checked didn’t have the features which I wanted so I vibe-coded it with Claude while waiting for my X4. It arrived on Thursday finally. After A LOT of performance fixes due to the small memory (which didn’t occur in the emulator), I finally got what I want!
I introduce Matcha reader, that features:
- Vertical & horizontal text support (optimized for Noto Sans & UGDigiKyokasho - didn’t check other fonts)
- Manga support with panels views (after converting the manga with the tool chain)
- A dictionary supporting the Yomitan Jitendex, JMnedict & grammar dict for offline use for both EPub & Manga (text extraction for Manga is done by Gemini API in the toolchain, requires a Gemini key. I first had a Mokuro implementation but I was not satisfied with the accuracy)
- A translation feature to look up a whole page with Gemini (requires an API key; for manga, the translation is embedded in the toolchain file, so translations are locally embedded. WiFi is required for books). The translation feature also works with other non-English books.
- A library view with covers & shelves (I got rid of recent books, the library is sorted by recent but shows all books)
- Statistics with a reading streak to motivate to read consistently
- Homescreen shows percentage read
- Embedded images in books are rendered as big as possible and rotated to fill most of the screen if necessary
- UI translation is available in Japanese, including optimizations to make the navigation between entries feel snappy
This was a fun project to do and I think this is the very first ebook reader that really does what I want!
It was very challenging to overcome the memory issues by the CJK font and vertical text. Also, I spent a lot of time formatting the vertical text nicely.
If you wanna try it as well, the fork is here.