Foliate and WebKitGTK

As a Linux Mint user with a love for reading, I recently encountered a frustrating issue while using the excellent Foliate ebook reader (installed via Flatpak) with ebooks. Attempting to open a specific Cyrillic book would result in an immediate application crash, accompanied by a "WebKit-Crashed" error in the terminal.

After some digging and experimentation, I've managed to find a simple workaround. The issue lies within Foliate's (or rather, the underlying WebKit rendering engine's) handling of hyphenation with Cyrillic fonts.

The Problem:

The crash seems to occur specifically when Foliate tries to hyphenate words in ebooks. This likely exposes a bug in the WebKitGTK engine's hyphenation algorithms for Cyrillic text.

The Solution: A Quick Layout Change

Thankfully, the fix is straightforward: disable hyphenation within Foliate's settings.

Here's how you can do it:

1. Open Foliate and select a book to open.

2. Once the book is open, press the key combination "Alt+," to open the app menu.

3. Navigate to the "Font & Layout Settings" section.

4. Click on the "Layout" tab.

5. You will see an option labelled "Hyphenation", which is enabled by default.

6. Switch this option off.

Once you've disabled hyphenation, it completely resolves the WebKit crashes, allowing you to read your books without any further issues.