About Latin Reader for Android

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The Latin Reader contains a selection of famous classical texts in both Latin and English. You can read Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Petronius, Lucretius, and others on your phone or tablet. The Latin Reader app includes a complete Latin to English dictionary with over 17,000 entries.

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About

In 2016, I started work at Google as a developer documentation writer for the Android Frameworks. For my start project, I decided to port my Latin Readers app from Windows to Android. This project gave me the opportunity to learn the Android API surface while also familiarizing myself with the Android developer experience.

Over the past 14 releases, I have gradually added features to the Latin Reader. I’ve added Kotlin code, improved the search experience, reduced the footprint of the app, and streamlined the navigation.

Attributions

Details

  • Current version: v1.7.0
  • Supported Android versions: 4.3 (Jelly Bean) and higher
  • Highest test version: Android 11 (Red Velvet Cake)

Features

  • 8+ works in the original Latin, including Caesar’s “Gallic Wars” (De Bello Gallico) and Virgil’s “Aeneid”
  • 8+ translations of Latin works, including Caesar’s “Gallic Wars”, Virgil’s
    “Aeneid”, and Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things”
  • Integrated Latin-to-English dictionary.
  • Tap-and-hold access to the integrated dictionary from the reading view.
  • Touch-friendly reading view providing clean, simple, uncluttered access to text.
  • Search the Latin-to-English dictionary by exact dictionary entry or by stem (partial search).
  • Quick access to English translation of Latin source text.
  • Integrated “Help” files.

Known issues

  • Mapping location between Latin source and English translations can sometimes get out-of-sync.