Structure in the flow

Just a note concerning two small new features I added to my Javascript speed reading (RSVP) app:

• You can now change the speed using your keyboard’s up/down arrows keys
• Text and background colors may now be selected using a color picker (based on JsColor)

These were features some users asked for either on the blog or in the comment form in the app. Thanks for the feedback!

Changelog

• 2009/04/10, added script to open files from file manager.

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I’ve long wanted a program to annotate PDFs under Ubuntu, but tried many options which all fell short in some way or another. Yet periodically I check to see if a new one has appeared and it seems my wishes have come true, though not through open source software.

PDF-XChange Viewer is a Windows freeware (pro version available too) which installed flawlessly under Wine (Windows emulator) in Ubuntu. In fact I had not used Wine up to this point, and I was surprised how indeed flawless the process was: ‘sudo apt-get install wine’, ‘wine installer.exe’. Bam. It just worked. And it loaded a huge PDF without flinching.

All is not so rosy, though, as the annotations and text won’t show up completely under Ubuntu default PDF viewer. But this had happened with annotations I had made with other programs, so I guess it has to do with Ubuntu’s viewer, not PDF-XChange. Indeed things worked a bit better under Xpdf.

The most surprising part in all of this is that the freeware beats other annotation options I had tried under Windows in the old days: it has many different ways of adding text to pages, different shapes to add and different highlighting options. So I guess I’d recommend that you try it even if you run Windows.

And a quick tip: you can add shortcuts for toolbar commands (including highlighting) by clicking right in the toolbar area, clicking “Customize…”, selecting the “Commands” tab, selecting “Highlight” under “Tools” and clicking “Properties”.

(Found via this post, from someone else who grappled with the other options)

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Launching with “Open with…” (NEW 2009/04/10)

To open PDF files from the file manager, put the following script somewhere, change its file permissions to “executable” and use it for the “Open with…” command (adapted from here):

#!/bin/bash  

# Then use this script as default to open PDF files

# Adapted from:
# http://sodeve.net/foxit-reader-on-ubuntu-linux-through-wine/

# Purpose: To convert Linux-style filename to Windows-style
# to pass as an argument to wine when starting PDF XChange Viewer
Filename="z:"${1//\//\\}  

#assuming you use the default installation folder for PDF
# XChange Viewer in Wine
App='eval wine "C:\Program Files\Tracker Software\PDF-XChange '
App=$App'Viewer\pdf-viewer\PDFXCview.exe" "'$Filename'"'

$App

Browsing the web, we see tons of different layouts: each site has his own. Though that makes for a more diverse experience, it’s not the best when you want to sit down and take the time to read a long article.

Those that use Firefox have certainly encountered extensions such as AdBlock Plus and Flashblock, which help in making web pages look less like a stress test for epilepsy. More general (cross-browser) solutions exist by using a proxy mechanism to filter incoming content, such as Privoxy.

Yet one can go even further to isolate the text of an article. Some sites offer a “print” version of their articles (usually a single, clean page), but that’s not the general case. That’s where the Aardvark extension comes in. It allows you to delete elements from a page and rearrange it quickly so you only keep the part you want.

Overview of Aardvark’s modification commands

Once installed, you navigate to a page you want to clean up and you launch Aardvark (Tools -> Start Aardvark). You then see a red rectangle over elements when your mouse pointer hovers over them. You  press keys to activate different editing operations for the selected element (press ‘h’ to get the list of commands).

Aardvark‘s help (list of commands)

It helps here to understand how web pages are coded (HTML), but in essence a page is made of rectangular zones inside bigger zones (ex: an image in a paragraph), forming a hierarchy. As your mouse pointer hovers over a given rectangle (say a paragraph title), you may want to select its parent in the hierarchy (the paragraph itself). To do it, you press ‘w’ to ‘widen’ the selection. The inverse operation is ‘n’ for ‘narrow’.

Example of Aardvark‘s rectangle selection

You can delete elements in essentially two ways. The first is the straightforward one: you select an element and press ‘r’ to remove it. The other is the opposite: you press ‘i’ to isolate the selected element, ie. keep only this one, remove all the rest. ‘i’ is very useful to select the page main element that contains the whole text, and then you can work the details with ‘r’.

If the isolated text is too narrow (doesn’t fill the page horizontally), you can press ‘d’ to ‘de-widthify’, which means that the ‘width’ attribute (which prevents the block from filling the page) is removed from it. You may have to fiddle a bit until you find the element on which the ‘width’ is applied, though.

Saving the result with ScrapBook

When the modifications are over, I save the page in its modified state using ScrapBook (which I covered in another blog post). I can then read in the format I want, and add notes and highlights. (The ScrapBook extension does have a “delete” feature, but it’s not as featureful as Aardvark’s.)

If an article is spread over multiple pages, you can use ScrapBook “Combine Wizard” (in the SB sidebar: Tools -> Combine Wizard) feature to merge them in a single page.

A few days ago I published a JavaScript-based web program, which takes a text as input and flashes groups of words successively. It’s inspired by many other similar programs available on the Web, some free, some not. The technique is called RSVP, for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. I baptized the program “Faster!” (well, I had to pick a name )

A screenshot of Faster!

Go ahead and try it out. Nothing to download, just click “Play that text”.

In the rest of the post I elaborate on similar software and the effectiveness of speed reading in general.

Continue reading ‘Speed reading and my RSVP web application’ »

This is a work in progress, but I’ve developped a small speed reading application in JavaScript. It’s definitely not the first of its kind, but I wanted web version with more options. I’m also planning to open source it, and I’ve yet to see an open source web app of this kind.

The app: http://www.fsavard.com/code/speedread/

You simply click “Play that text” and you should grasp the principle real quick.

This is thought by some to increase your reading speed if used consistently. It teaches to not go back while reading, not “subvocalize” (ie. hear the words in your head, or even whisper them as you read) and by displaying more than one word at a time, to read more in one glance.

If you like it and want to come back to it, there’s a bookmarklet in the “About & download” tab that will allow you to select text in any web page and use it as input. Or you can simply copy & paste the text in the text area.

I’ll post something more lengthy on speed reading at some point.