This fork: Plato on the Kindle Paperwhite 3

This is a fork of baskerville/plato focused on running Plato on the Kindle Paperwhite 3 (muscat, i.MX6SL "Wario", firmware 5.16.2.1.1, kernel 3.0.35-lab126, 1072×1448 @ 300 dpi, armv7 soft-float ABI, glibc 2.20). What it adds, each piece recorded in PATCHES.md:

• A Kindle backend: the lab126 mxcfb ioctl dialect (72-byte mxcfb_update_data, REAGL waveforms), cyttsp4_mt multi-touch (TouchProto::MultiSlot), max77696 battery and frontlight, selected via PLATO_DEVICE=kindle-pw3.
• A self-contained cross-build (xbuild.py) using zig cc + cargo-zigbuild — no vendor toolchain, sha256-pinned third-party sources, an ABI gate that rejects hard-float output.
• PDF reading tuned for academic papers: automatic content-box cropping, continuous scroll with an overlap anchor on page turns, and automatic two-column detection with column-wise navigation.
• Robustness fixes that are not Kindle-specific: a missing external helper can no longer crash the app, and a refused suspend no longer loops.
• Getting documents onto the device, host half included: crates/foldersync (pull a folder from a Mac on the LAN), crates/platonic (push one document and open it), crates/pairing (pairing from a code shown on the panel — SPAKE2, same-WiFi only, no account and no cloud) and crates/platonic-recv, which is what a paired Mac gets instead of a shell.

Installing the Mac-side tool

cargo install --path crates/platonic

Note the --path: cargo install platonic looks on crates.io, where this is not published, and pointing it at the workspace root fails with "there is nothing to install … only packages with binaries can be installed", because the root package has no binary.

Then platonic FILE pushes a document to the reader and opens it, platonic https://… sends a link the reader opens in its built-in article view (fetched and readability-extracted on the device — nothing is pushed), and platonic --pair --code … pairs a new Mac using the code the reader shows.

The sibling repo

This repository is the reader itself. adriaanm/platokin holds the tooling that makes it work on a Paperwhite 3 — installing and launching it, the host-side scripts, and the design docs explaining why things are the way they are here.

The split keeps this repo a Plato fork that can be read, built and upstreamed on its own. Where a feature has two halves, both halves are here and the design doc is next door.

We're happy to upstream any of this if there's interest — the build hygiene, the PDF features and the robustness fixes were written to be upstreamable; the Kindle backend is cleanly additive. Open an issue or PR conversation on this fork.

Plato is a document reader for Kobo's e-readers.

Documentation: GUIDE, MANUAL and BUILD.

Supported firmwares

Any 4.X.Y firmware, with X ≥ 6, will do.

Supported devices

• Libra Colour.
• Clara Colour.
• Clara BW.
• Elipsa 2E.
• Clara 2E.
• Libra 2.
• Sage.
• Elipsa.
• Nia.
• Libra H₂O.
• Forma.
• Clara HD.
• Aura H₂O Edition 2.
• Aura Edition 2.
• Aura ONE.
• Glo HD.
• Aura H₂O.
• Aura.
• Glo.
• Touch C.
• Touch B.

Supported formats

• PDF, CBZ, FB2, MOBI, XPS and TXT via MuPDF.
• ePUB through a built-in renderer.
• DJVU via DjVuLibre.

Features

• Crop the margins.
• Continuous fit-to-width zoom mode with line preserving cuts.
• Rotate the screen (portrait ↔ landscape).
• Adjust the contrast.
• Define words using dictd dictionaries.
• Annotations, highlights and bookmarks.
• Retrieve articles from online sources through hooks (an example wallabag article fetcher is provided).

Donations