Bookie is a piece of software that aims to make reading image texts quick and intuitive. Anyone who has tried to read long text saved as an image in programs like Microsoft Paint or Photoshop will know that it’s not an easy task. Bookie aims to fix this, by giving you a simple, unobtrusive interface and a full window to view the text. Rather than trying to fit a whole page of text onto one screen, Bookie has a 640x480 viewport, and employs scrolling to view the rest of the page. The text appears at actual size, so there is no image distortion or blurriness.

Bookie isn’t just for text though, any long image can be loaded for easy viewing. Bookie currently only supports JPEG, but look out for better format support in future releases. We're still only in beta :-b

A large part of Bookie is the user interface, or should I say, the lack of! When reading, all user interface elements are hidden, enabling you to get on with your reading. By pressing the home, end, page up, page down and up, down, left and right arrow keys, you can navigate the page vertically and horizontally. To view the scrollbar, simply hover over the right hand side of the screen and the scrollbar fades into view. The scrollbar gives you precise control over your page, and as soon as you let go of the scrollbar, it disappears again, letting you get on with reading. For horizontal movement, there is another scrollbar on the top of the screen. Use the mouse wheel to scroll vertically, and hold the ctrl key and use the mouse wheel to scroll horizontally.

Skin support is also a big part of Bookie. Every aspect of the program is skinnable, from the scrollbar to the popout menu. For more information on skinning, check out the "Theming" page on the Wiki.

We hope you enjoy using Bookie. If you have any comments, feature requests or bug reports, feel free to let us know what you think about it!