E-reader firmware for the Xteink X3, X4 and X4 Pro, the LilyGo T5S3 Pro and the Murphy M3, based on crosspoint-reader, a great piece of software by Dave Allie and others. It reads EPUB, TXT, Markdown and XTC books, lays out their CSS properly, and sets text in Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, ten Indic scripts, Burmese, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, right to left and top to bottom included.
Screenshots from an Xteink X3. Every script but Latin is set in a Noto font from the Font Manager.
| Device | Chip | Touch | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xteink X4 | ESP32-C3 | no | software clock |
| Xteink X3 | ESP32-C3 | no | clock chip, tilt sensor |
| Xteink X4 Pro | ESP32-S3 | yes | PSRAM, clock chip, reading light |
| LilyGo T5S3 Pro | ESP32-S3 | yes | PSRAM, clock chip, reading light |
| Murphy M3 | ESP32-S3 | yes | PSRAM, clock chip, reading light |
Everything runs on the X3 and X4 as well. The two ESP32-C3 boards have no PSRAM, and still get the whole reader: TrueType and OpenType fonts, every script below with OpenType shaping and bidi, vertical Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the hyphenation packs and Publisher Fonts. What they lack is mostly hardware: touch, a reading light, USB drive mode (USB Transfer over the cable takes its place) and, on the X4, a clock chip; KOReader sync runs when a book closes rather than in the background. The full list: ESP32-C3 boards.
Want your device supported? Consider donating one: support for a board needs the board on the desk. Open an issue to arrange it.
Flashing is done from the browser — no toolchain or driver install needed. Use a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, Opera) or a recent Firefox version (>151); older versions of Firefox and Safari do not support WebSerial.
- Download
firmware.binfor your device from the latest release. - Open the CrossPoint flash tools.
- Pick your device.
- Choose Custom .bin and upload the
firmware.binyou downloaded in step 1. - Connect the device via USB and start the flash — pick the device's serial port when the browser asks.
For everything the reader does and how to use it, see the User Guide. How it compares with CrossPoint, feature by feature: Feature comparison.
| Script | Languages (examples) | Layout | Fonts (Font Manager) | Hyphenation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin, Cyrillic | English, German, French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian, ... | full CSS layout | built in (Serif, Noto Sans), or any TrueType, OpenType or .cpfont |
20 languages; English built in, the others as downloadable packs |
| Greek | Greek | full CSS layout | any TrueType or OpenType font with Greek letters; the built-in reading fonts have none | none yet |
| Hebrew | Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino | right to left, niqqud, right-to-left page turns | Noto Sans and Serif Hebrew | none |
| Arabic script | Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, Kurdish | right to left, OpenType joining and marks, the end-of-ayah sign around its number | Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Arabic | none |
| Indic, ten scripts | Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Sinhala | OpenType shaping: conjuncts, reph, vowel signs | Noto Sans and Serif per script | 12 languages, between syllables |
| Myanmar | Burmese, Mon, Shan, S'gaw Karen | OpenType shaping, line breaks between syllables | Noto Sans and Serif Myanmar | syllable breaks |
| Chinese, Japanese, Korean | CJK line breaking and punctuation, ruby, emphasis dots, vertical text with tate-chu-yoko | Noto Sans and Serif CJK, per region | not needed |
Shaping is OpenType, done once when a chapter is laid out and identical to HarfBuzz on the shipped fonts; bidi follows
the Unicode algorithm, with the book's dir, <bdi>, <bdo>, unicode-bidi and page direction honoured. A book that
needs a font or a hyphenation pack it does not have offers to download it when it opens. The interface is translated
into 30 languages, among them Hebrew, Arabic and Persian, and the keyboard has English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh,
Hebrew, Arabic and Greek layouts. StarDict dictionaries look words up in horizontal and vertical text.
- Speed: pages render fast, the next ones are prepared in the background, and chapters are indexed during reading pauses, so the "Indexing" message shows up less often.
- Layout: floating figures with text wrapped around them, real tables (colspan, images inside), small caps,
strikethrough, superscript and subscript,
line-heightandfont-sizefrom the book, drop caps, GIF, PNG and JPEG images, large-image placeholders, Markdown with headings, tables and code. - Memory: where others run out, Witch Reader still works: on the X3 and X4 a chapter is laid out in an arena lent from the second framebuffer (on the S3 boards, in PSRAM), and hyphenation patterns come from packs on the SD card instead of the firmware image.
- Fonts: the Font Manager downloads TrueType, OpenType and
.cpfontfamilies over Wi-Fi; a book's own fonts can be used (Publisher Fonts); large-print sizes up to 26 pt. - Library: Books, Recent, New and Authors tabs, as file names, details or a cover grid; a cover carousel on Home; a book information screen; global bookmarks and named starred pages; reading statistics.
- Sync and network: KOReader sync that lands on the exact page in both directions, OPDS catalogs, Calibre, a web interface with file manager and settings, WebDAV, captive-portal login, weather.
- Device: a clock on every board, sleep screens with an information overlay or a transparent picture over the page, user-defined actions for each button's single, double and long press, touch gestures on the X4 Pro, T5S3 and Murphy.
- Great UI design is not necessarily/obviously not a forte of mine, so if you look for a polished look and feel, I would recommend going e.g. to CrossInk, a great piece of work by uxJulia
- The most memory efficient reader might still be MicroReader by CidVonHighwind
- PDF and MOBI books; Thai, Lao, Khmer and Tibetan; Nastaliq for Urdu and kashida justification for Arabic.
- Indic and Burmese book titles outside the reader draw in the font of the last book read, and are left out when it lacks their script; hyphenation for Greek, Romanian and Kazakh. The full list: Current Limitations.
All of them have their strengths and constraints (as has Witch reader), so they deserve a testrun before you decide which one is right for you
This firmware stands on the work of others, crosspoint-reader above all; CREDITS.md lists the projects, the people whose code is ported here, the vendored libraries and the fonts. How the fork came to its name: Project history.