Reader Question
A reader is looking for a software application to help her read digital documents, any suggestions on something which can do the following:
A rather mundane question I have for you. . . have you encountered something that could help make the reading process easier for digital documents? Something akin to dragging a colored index card along a page quickly as you read? I am a very fast reader with paper, but find my eyes wandering when looking at a screen. . . . My admittedly uninspired work-around is creating a word document, restoring down the screen, and using the little blue header to pull down on top of the digital document as I read. . . but a better solution would be just a colored floating bar that you could pull from your desktop and use as you are reading.
Anyone know of something that would work? Mac and/or PC?
October 11th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
This is a web utility that may be helpful:
http://www.spreeder.com/
Its designed as a speed reading app and by default displays a single word at a very high speed, but you can have it display several words at once at a much slower speed.
Alternatively there is an app for mac that will reformat text into columns that are designed to be easier to read.
http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/
If you still need a guide, you can just open a window and drag it around as if it were a notecard.
Hope that helps.
October 11th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Skim is a PDF reader for OS X that features a nice reading bar, as well as annotations.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
This is a fun coincidence, but it turns out I’ve just programmed and (yesterday!) published a little web app that is similar to Spreeder, but a little more featureful, I think (you can display more than one word at a time, and keep track of where you are in the text — and no ads
):
http://www.fsavard.com/code/speedread/
(nothing to download, just click play)
If you want an offline version for download, you might want to check out WordFlashReader, which also allows you to follow your position in the text by highlighting:
http://wordflashreader.sourceforge.net/
Yet I don’t think that’s exactly what you’re seeking. To do what you do with a sized-down window, I usually simply select the text repeatedly to have landmarks for my eyes.fs
October 12th, 2008 at 6:34 am
For reading PDFs and organising a PDF collection I like the straightforward free Adobe Digital Editions reader for PC/Mac from http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/ Only line/page up/down but remembers last page read.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:59 am
I don’t know if this absolutely fills the need of the inquirer, but it might. On the other hand, it’s a very cool app in any event.
Cueprompter works like a teleprompter. It’s a web app. You just load in the copy you want to scroll up the screen and set the speed and size of the font you want.
It’s originally designed to serve as a teleprompter type aid for presentations and such, but there’s no reason it couldn’t serve the purpose requested in the inquiry.
It’s on the web and totally free. I have no connection to the company, just a satisfied user.
http://cueprompter.com/