About Latin Reader for Windows

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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 2013, I started working as a Programmer-Writer on the Windows SDK team in the Operating Systems division in Microsoft. The Windows 8.1 release was on the horizon and the JavaScript API for Windows (aka “WinJS”) needed documentation. I joined the team specifically to assist writing the Windows 8.1 documentation for WinJS. As I started the gig, I realized that I needed to build my own app to understand the API surface in a credible way.

The question was: what kind of app to create?

One day I was riding on the bus to work, trying to brush up on my Latin reading skills. The bus bounced and jounced down the freeway, sending my book and dictionary all over the place. I thought to myself, “If only I had an app that allowed me to read my source work, look up words in the dictionary, AND view an English translation of the work.”

Thus, the concept for the Latin Reader was born.

Details

  • Current version: v1.4.0.1
  • Supported Windows versions: 8.0, 8.1, 10

Attributions

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.
  • Right-click 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).
  • “Marginalia” (in the margins) note taking.
  • Quick access to English translation of Latin source text.
  • A “word of the day” vocabulary section, randomly selected from the dictionary.
  • Integrated “Help” files accessed through the Settings charm.

Known issues

  • Important: Support from Microsoft for Windows 8, 8.1, and 10 has ended. The Latin Reader for Windows app is available only as-is, with no promise of forward compatibility, for all versions of Windows larger than 10.