31–40 of 71 posts
I would pay for an out of the box version of this with a bookmark feature. I am an author that can't code. Help
1. In the URL, eg. “example.com/#line1234”
2. In the user’s browser (cookie, local storage)
3. On the server, requiring users to have accounts and be logged in
The zine is here: https://jminjie.github.io/zine/
And you can see the repo here https://github.com/jminjie/zine
I deem that almost all of the value of pagination on most devices¹ is in static pagination: that you can refer to things by page numbers, that it helps your memory, things like that. I am a Christian and read my Bible daily, and I know just where on the page a great many things that I might look for, which helps me to find them rapidly when I don’t remember the chapter and verse. In the not-too-distant past (say, 180…
You might have a point in general, but the Bible is a poor example of the issue you highlight. The Bible has had the solution to your problem built-in for centuries already. Bible passages are identified by chapter and verse; no one refers to Biblical passages by page numbers. Bible software shouldn't bother with pages at all. It should instead allow reading to flow smoothly from one verse to the next, and only creat…
(That’s also why hard breaks at chapter boundaries is a horrible idea. They split stories artificially all the time. If you must do scrolling, make it infinite scrolling.)
When I have to use a different Bible from my primary one, it’s really hard finding everything I want to find, because it’s just not in the right place on the page! It’s similar for spatial memory of things relative to other books, or relative to the length of the Bible as a whole: you just get a better sense of how it all fits together. (That’s what I was going for with the parable reference last paragraph.) Accessing things only by references and searches and scrolling disembodies it and I am convinced does a great deal of harm in comprehension.
For purely reading the Bible, yes, PDF is a good solution. But that reduces it to a very poor imitation of paper, discarding almost all the potential strengths of the computer (weak search is the only one retained).
I can keep my finger in two or three places in the Bible and flip between them and other such things—it comes naturally and can genuinely be called intuitive. Unless you go skeuomorph, no interface for achieving anything similar on the computer is ever intuitive, and obtaining even halfway good ergonomics is extremely difficult. (A skeuomorph is no panacea here, but I think it can make things easier. My point is more about the conceptual advantages of the old medium, with a view to attempting to integrate its virtues rather than just discarding it because we’re on a different physical medium now.)
Very nice, my scroll wheel makes it go really slow but that is probably an issue on my end.
I ever say that scrolljacking is always bad.
If you open most books on the shelf you will notice that text is not left-aligned, but is in fact justified to create a consistent vertical margin on the right-hand side[0]. It's the big thing I always miss when I try reading on the web. One way to do this is with JavaScript implementations of the LaTeX hyphenation/justification algorithm. Check out [1] and [2] for examples. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/65ICUVW.png [1]:…
I haven't looked through fully to make sure it has no ill effects, but if you add to the css on p: text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-word; you should get what you're looking for. At least it worked in Firefox inspector.
Anyway, in all current browsers, `text-align: justify` does greedy text layout, where it fits as many words in each line as it can before wrapping. This is technically trivial, but visually inferior to Knuth-Plass line breaking, which tries to find the most visually-pleasing place to break lines. Look at the screenshots of https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak to see the difference. It can be rather stark.
The work is nicely done. But each time I see a website presenting a book content or catalog in pages like that, like if it was a real book, it really pisses me off. It is a design move that goes against ergonomy. Harder/slower to browser, harder/slower to seek, you have to do a mental break while pages are changing with effect that does not get the same efficiency feeling than a real book.
The work is nicely done. But each time I see a website presenting a book content or catalog in pages like that, like if it was a real book, it really pisses me off. It is a design move that goes against ergonomy. Harder/slower to browser, harder/slower to seek, you have to do a mental break while pages are changing with effect that does not get the same efficiency feeling than a real book.
Agreed. The best way to deliver text over the web, is to make an ordinary web page. The web not a paper-based technology, and shouldn't emulate paper. I recently discovered the FreeBSD Journal. [0] These days it's only available online, but your only options are to download a PDF, or to view it in the browser in what seems to be a JavaScript-based PDF viewer. Their viewer seems to lack vital features such as zoom lev…
[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/ [1] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/5/ [2] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/3/
The author (of both the book in the demo and this software itself) is Robin Sloan. He publishes a couple email newsletters, all of which I recommend. Most recently he's been writing a development diary for a video game he's working on[0]. He published a handful of GPT-2 generated city descriptions based on a corpus of fantasy literature that was a lot of fun[1]. There's great content about the illustration style as w…