I have a similar project for speed-reading in the terminal: https://github.com/0hAodha/ogma
It works on plaintext, but you can define pre-processing hooks to convert, e.g., a PDF or webpage into readable content using the config file.
Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
21–30 of 85 posts
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#22Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free! Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text. Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravat…
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Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#23Very interesting, thank you for making it and releasing it for free! Do you get faster as you practice reading like that? I read ~50-60 pages per hour in English. That would be maybe 375-425 words per minute and also seems to be about the maximum I can more or less follow with ReadKinetic just trying the demo text. Although, I don't feel like I understand quite as well what I have just read and it felt a bit aggravat…
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Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#24This is a great experience. I wonder how an e-ink friendly version would look like. I don't think word by word would work but maybe sentence by sentence? but then would that break the effect? Either way, I'll definitely try with a book I've been procrastinating on reading ahahah.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#25[flagged]
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#26I have a similar project for speed-reading in the terminal: https://github.com/0hAodha/ogma It works on plaintext, but you can define pre-processing hooks to convert, e.g., a PDF or webpage into readable content using the config file.
Oh nice, the pre-processing hooks are a way cleaner way of solving the format issue than I was doing. When you are on the terminal you can shell out to pdftotext or pandoc and people use the format convertor that they already know and trust. But when you are writing stuff for the browser you have to include the format convertors in the download so I was including pdf.js, JSZip and mammoth in the build and still could not handle formats that I had not seen.
Your method also nicely solves that thing that I keep on getting asked for which is copy and paste a url and have it fetch the article and display the text. I had somebody email me about that today! On the terminal you just get something like: curl some_url | readable and you are pretty much done. On the browser it's a cross origin request so you will want to include a server that fetchies it and well that would kinda be missing the point of having local rendering.
Something that i was wondering is if monospaced text would have made it easier for you to find the alignment for the pivot? Fixed-width is simple, since your optimal offset is just a character offset. For proportional text i'm just taking my best effort pivot character and anchoring it, and then extending word fragments from that point in both directions. Otherwise the words can tend to wander as you eye flows from character to character.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#27This is a great experience. I wonder how an e-ink friendly version would look like. I don't think word by word would work but maybe sentence by sentence? but then would that break the effect? Either way, I'll definitely try with a book I've been procrastinating on reading ahahah.
E-ink is the frustrating part because it's where people actually read books, yet it's the display least capable of doing this. Partial refresh allows for a handful of updates each second, but it comes with ghosting. At 300 words per minute, which is a word every 200 milliseconds, you'd be reading through the residue of the last two or three words. Full refresh clears that, but it flashes the entire panel and takes long enough that you would only read about a word per second.
Your idea about sentences does affect the experience, but I don’t believe that makes it worse; it’s just a different approach. Once a whole sentence appears on screen, your eyes move across it again, so the no eye movement part is lost. What remains is the return sweep, the long jump back to the start of the next line, and the moment when you lose your place on a dense page. Those are real challenges in normal reading, and chunking by sentence removes both. You would end up closer to guided pacing than RSVP, which might suit a book better anyway.
Let me know how the procrastinated book turns out.
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#28I have a similar project for speed-reading in the terminal: https://github.com/0hAodha/ogma It works on plaintext, but you can define pre-processing hooks to convert, e.g., a PDF or webpage into readable content using the config file.
Oh nice, the pre-processing hooks are a way cleaner way of solving the format issue than I was doing. When you are on the terminal you can shell out to pdftotext or pandoc and people use the format convertor that they already know and trust. But when you are writing stuff for the browser you have to include the format convertors in the download so I was including pdf.js, JSZip and mammoth in the build and still could…
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Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#29[deleted]
Re: Show HN: ReadKinetic – a free, local-first speed reader for your own books
#30I like how it pauses near where I would normally pause while reading. How did you choose the cadence?
Thanks, that's the detail I was most hoping someone would pick up on. It started as a flat interval and felt terrible. Every word got the same slot, so sentences never landed and it read like a stock ticker. Now there's a base duration from the WPM setting, with per word multipliers on top: 3x on sentence-ending punctuation, 2x on commas and semicolons, and an extra 0.7x if the word is 8 characters or longer. The pun…
Love that attention to detail. I'll try this out for longer reading sessions, nice work!