Desktop app

The Aristotle Reader — Desktop

The Aristotle Reader is free online — this is the same reader, off the grid. The desktop app carries the whole public-domain corpus with it: Greek text and public-domain English translations, aligned line-for-line to the Bekker edition, dictionary lookups, and search, all built in.

No connection required once it's installed, nothing loads from a server, and nothing you do in it — reading, importing, annotating — is sent anywhere. It's the same texts and the same alignment as the website, just private and offline.

Download

Download link coming with the first release.

Built for Macs on Apple silicon and Intel. (Minimum macOS version to be confirmed before this page goes live.)

Windows and Linux builds aren't available yet — see the FAQ below.

Installing

The app isn't signed with an Apple Developer certificate, so the first time you open it, macOS Gatekeeper will step in and refuse a normal double-click. This doesn't mean anything is wrong — it's what Gatekeeper does for any app distributed outside the App Store without a paid developer certificate. The app is open source, so you can read exactly what it does.

To open it the first time:

1. Download the .dmg and drag The Aristotle Reader into your Applications folder.
2. In Applications, right-click (or Control-click) the app and choose Open.
3. A dialog will ask if you're sure — click Open.

After that first time, it opens normally, like any other app.

Importing your own translations

You're not limited to the built-in corpus. The app can import a plain-text or Markdown file of your own translation and align it to the Bekker spine automatically.

Tags go in braces, placed immediately before the word they belong to (tag, one space, then the word). Use the numbers as printed in your source — never a computed count.

• {1.7} — Chapter (book.chapter). Required, before the first word of each chapter. For single-book works, use book 1: {1.4} means chapter 4.
• {1094a} — Bekker column. Optional, before the first word of that column.
• {20} — Bekker line, within the current column. Optional, if your edition prints line numbers (usually every fifth line).

Example:

{1.1} Every art and every inquiry, and similarly
every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at
some good… {1094b} But a certain difference is
found among ends…

Whatever detail your tags don't provide is filled in by alignment — and always labelled as an estimate in the margin. Chapter tags alone are enough for a working parallel text; column and line tags simply sharpen it. The app also catches OCR line-break hyphens (like under- at the end of a scanned line) and asks you to confirm the ones it can't resolve on its own. You never write a metadata header by hand — the import form handles that.

When you import, you're asked whether the file is a personal copy of a copyrighted translation. If so, it's kept private to your computer, never bundled or shared. If it's public domain or openly licensed, you can say so instead.

Annotations & data

Everything you do in the app — highlights, notes, imported translations — is stored as plain files on your own machine, under your user Application Support folder (~/Library/Application Support/org.aristotlereader.desktop/ on macOS). Annotations are one JSON file per work, shaped after the W3C Web Annotation model — an open, documented format, not a proprietary database. You can export a bundle of your annotations and imports at any time from the library panel, as a single file you can back up or move to another machine.

FAQ

Is it free?
Yes. Same as the website — no account, no paywall, no ads.

Does it phone home?
No. The app doesn't make network requests in normal use. Nothing you read, import, or annotate leaves your computer. (Auto-update isn't wired up yet in this release; when it is, checking for updates will be the one exception, and it will be clearly optional.)

Is there a Windows or Linux version?
Not yet. macOS is first because that's what the app is built and tested on; other platforms are possible later but aren't planned for a specific date.