Open-Source & Acknowledgements

Athena Reader is built upon many open-source projects and free, commercially usable resources. We list the main third-party dictionaries, fonts and software below, and extend our sincere thanks to their authors and communities. Copyright in these materials remains with their respective owners; we preserve their original attributions and licenses when distributing them.

1. Dictionary Data

Every dictionary package we publish carries its own license, original title and upstream address, shown per package under Settings → Dictionary Library in the app; that listing is generated from our dictionary catalogue and is the authoritative version of this section. Summarised by license:

  • ECDICT (English-Chinese / Chinese-English), mapull Modern Chinese Dictionary — MIT License

  • CC-CEDICT (Chinese-English) — CC BY-SA 4.0

  • HanDeDict (Chinese-German), CFDICT (Chinese-French) — CC BY-SA 3.0

  • FreeDict multilingual dictionaries, including those parts generated by WikDict from Wiktionary data — GNU General Public License

On the "corresponding source" for the GPL packages: what we distribute is a SQLite conversion of FreeDict's original release format, which makes it a modified version. The original data is available from https://freedict.org/, and the conversion scripts we use are open-sourced together with this project (the scripts/dict/ directory). If you would rather we hand you the corresponding source for a particular package directly, request it at support@athena-reader.com and we will provide it free of charge.

When quoting dictionary content, please follow the attribution and share-alike requirements of the corresponding license.

2. Fonts (all under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, free for commercial use)

  • Chinese: Noto Sans SC, Noto Serif SC

  • Chinese handwriting and display: LXGW WenKai, LXGW ZhenKai, LXGW Marker Gothic, Yozai, Smiley Sans, ZCOOL XiaoWei, ZCOOL KuaiLe

  • Latin: Inter, Lora, Merriweather, Literata, EB Garamond

The version, subset and upstream address of each family are recorded individually in web/public/fonts/LICENSES.md within the project.

The SIL OFL permits free use, modification, embedding and redistribution (including commercial), provided the fonts are not sold on their own and the copyright and license notices are retained. We subset the fonts (keeping only the glyphs we need, to reduce download size), which the OFL permits as a modification; the original families and our subsetting parameters are both stated in that file.

3. Major Open-Source Software

  • Reading & rendering: foliate-js, PDF.js (Apache-2.0)

  • Frontend: React, Vite, Tailwind CSS, Framer Motion, Tiptap / ProseMirror

  • Offline sync: PowerSync, SQLite

  • Mobile: Capacitor

  • And many other excellent open-source libraries not listed here individually

We are deeply grateful to these projects and their contributors. If you believe this acknowledgement contains an omission or an incorrect attribution, please contact us at support@athena-reader.com and we will correct it promptly.