Settings reference

Finding a setting

Choosing an entry scrolls to that card and moves the keyboard focus to its heading, so a keyboard reader lands where a mouse reader looks. The list marks where you are as you scroll.

Profile

Who you are reading as, and a Switch profile button that returns to the profile picker. Everything per-profile in the rest of this page follows whoever is selected here, so check it before changing anything else on a shared machine.

Demonstration mode

Fills the app with invented stories, books, chapters and progress so you can look around a populated library without preparing one. Nothing reaches the server or your real profile while it is on, and leaving restores everything exactly as it was.

Appearance

Applies to every screen, and follows your profile between devices.

• Light or dark, or System to follow the device.
• Colour scheme. The page, cards and borders: Warm, Zinc, Slate, Mist, Olive, Sand or Midnight. Every scheme uses the same lightness steps, so switching changes the character of the greys and never makes body text harder to read.
• Base colour. What colour buttons and highlights are: nine named colours plus Custom. A custom colour is treated as a hue only, with the app setting its brightness, so a dark navy cannot produce a button whose label you cannot read.

Reader typography is deliberately not repeated here. This card carries one sentence saying so, and a button that opens the reading view's own panel, so there is a single place each value is set.

Your fonts

Install your own TTF, OTF, WOFF or WOFF2 files and they appear in the reading view's font list. They are stored with your profile and travel with it through library sync and portable exports.

Desktop connection

Desktop app only. Switches between running the library on this computer and using a Fiction Reader server. It validates the address and access token before it writes anything, then restarts.

Switching to a server leaves the local library on disk untouched, so switching back is not destructive.

Offline reading

Desktop and Android apps only. The mode (Automatic, Work offline or Off), what is stored on this device with a size against each story, per-story removal, and how many changes are queued waiting to go back. See Reading offline.

My Books

This card is shown whether or not the feature is on, because the card is how you turn it on.

• Turn on My Books. Takes effect immediately; no restart.
• Folder. Where the files live. Read-only, marked set by the server, when whoever configured the server named one.
• Show My Books in the sidebar. Per profile.
• Books and disk used, plus failed imports and the trash size.
• Look for new books, Empty trash and Re-import failed.

Full detail on My Books.

Sync

Which service is connected, what is stored there, when this device last synced, your other devices and when each was last heard from, what is included, and any error. Plus Sync now and Disconnect. See More than one device.

Archive verification

Checks that this machine still holds the chapters and images its database promises. It reports problems and never repairs or deletes anything on its own.

• Quick check. Every file exists and is the recorded size. It does not prove the contents are intact, and the card says so.
• Deep check. Reads and hashes every archived file. Slow, and hard on a large disk.
• Quick check weekly. Off by default. Deep checks stay manual.

After a run you get the counts, the first two hundred findings, and the path to the full report. Two follow-up actions are offered explicitly: queue the repairable chapters through the ordinary download queue, or hand orphaned files to the space-reclaiming job. A book on a drive that is currently unplugged reads as not reachable right now, not as damaged.

Results are about this machine's disk, so they are never synced to your other devices.

Help

Show me around again replays the guided tour from the beginning.

Downloads

• Simultaneous downloads. How many chapters are fetched at once. Per-site pacing still applies on top, so this is about your own connection, not politeness.
• Trial read by default. Ticks the trial box on every new subscription. See Trial read.
• How much a trial downloads. Counted in whatever the site calls its parts, and always fetched in order, first to last, so you can start reading before the rest arrives.
• Debug mode. Adds a read-only database browser to the sidebar.

Proxy for downloads

Server and desktop only. Loads the same proxy auto-configuration file your browser uses, so the server routes its own requests the way your browser routes yours. It exists for sites that refuse the server's location, usually image hosts; anything the file sends direct stays direct.

Upload the file or fetch it from a URL. It is never displayed back to you: the card reports its name, size and age, and a Check an address box answers the only question a rule really raises, which is whether a given address would be proxied. A stored file that will not compile is reported whether the switch is on or off, because the alternative way to find out is noticing that pictures stopped arriving.

Stale stories

How long an active story may go with nothing new before the library points it out: one month, three, six, a year, or a number of days. Nothing happens automatically. It produces a chip and a filter, and the decision to unsubscribe stays yours.

Trials and archived stories are never counted. One is capped by design and the other is already put away, so calling either stale would be describing your own decision back to you.

After reading a chapter

What happens to a chapter's downloaded text once you finish it: Keep it (the default), Ask me, or Delete it.

Only the text goes. The chapter stays in the list, stays marked read, keeps its place in the sequence, and can be downloaded again at any time. This never applies to your own imported books.

Reading list backup

Writes a plain-text file listing every story you are subscribed to, its link, and the last chapter you read, either on demand or on a schedule. It is kept in the database and on the content volume.

The point of it is leaving. If you ever stop using Fiction Reader, that file lets you pick the stories back up in ordinary browser tabs.

Sources

Sorted with the enabled ones first, and a count above them. Each row shows the site's name, its enabled switch, whether an account is stored, the pacing in words, and the last login error. A site that is enabled and needs an account it does not have opens expanded, because it is the one you have to act on.

Inside an expanded source

• Account. Username and password, and a separate Sign in button. The password field is write-only: it shows a placeholder when one is stored and only sends a value when you type a new one. Two-factor authentication is not supported.
• Request pacing. Requests per minute, burst, and minimum interval, with a plain-words summary of what the three add up to. These commit when you release a slider or leave a box, never on every keystroke, because saving 1 on the way to typing 12 would briefly remove the floor that protects someone else's server.
• Fetch strategy. Automatic, plain HTTP, or a browser engine.
• Descriptions. How many descriptions may be fetched at once while browsing, and whether to fetch them at all. On a forum each description is a separate request, so this is the slow part of a browse.

The three forums share pacing, fetch strategy and description settings, and one button copies a figure worked out for one across to the others. Accounts and the enabled switch are always per site.

Which cards you see

A card that describes something this installation does not have is absent, not disabled.