• 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!

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

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)

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

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 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.

Comparing it to other available software

One (free & open source) program which has similar features, but more options for rhythm, is Dictator. You must download it though. I created my script to have something approaching that functionality, but available through the web and easy to modify for people who know JavaScript (and, *hrm*, because it made a cute little programming project )

Screenshot of Dictator

Other Web versions (see Spreeder and ZAPReader) are nice but lack some features which make Dictator and commercial programs more appealing, notably following the position in the text. Spreeder does have some more advanced rhythm options, though.

There are many commercial programs which offer even more features, such as integration with Office programs. Instead of trying to list them all here, I’ll point you to this comparison table of free and commercial RSVP programs.

I also want to make my version available for integration in other sites (say, for readers to read your blog posts), but I’m waiting for a few interested webmasters to contact me before I take the time to do it.

Why would one use RSVP? and the reality of speed reading

As mentioned briefly in my last post, some people believe this can help increase your reading speed. The idea is to gradually increase the reading speed, the number of words you read in a group, etc. by tweaking parameters in the software as you progress.

Recently, RSVP was also proposed as an alternative way to read on small displays such as cellphones. Some people seem to actually see RSVP as an alternative reading technique rather than simply a way to increase your “normal reading” speed.

My personal experience with the speed reading aspect is that in can indeed help you learn to focus more and reread back less of the text you read a line before. Also, it forces you to decrease subvocalization — hear the text in your head, or even whisper it. I personally never ended the in-head habit completely, though. Phrasal blurbs seem to overlap rather than disappear, if you will.

All these improvements translate in an increased reading speed for some material. They’re basic goals of “classic” speed reading techniques. A good reference for these techniques can be found at Wikibooks.

Speed reading software also has critics; see the bottom of the Wikibooks page.

Types of reading material

If you’re reading some advanced math textbook, taking the time to understand what you’re reading, sentence by sentence, naturally decreases your reading speed. Basically, speed reading is definitely no panacea for Will Hunting your way through a textbook every 30 minutes.

Where it can really help, though, in my experience (and as said by others), is when reading familiar material, say when reading the daily news or reading multiple opinion pieces on a given event.

Speed reading is to be combined with, but not confused with, skimming. Skimming is about not reading at all some parts. Speed reading is about reading faster the whole thing.

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.

When I read plain old dead-tree books, I almost always have my highlighters in hand, generally two colors, one for importance and one for new concepts. I will also add margin notes, especially when something is not clear and requires some thought (lots of thought often means pages upon pages of columnar scribbling…).

These additions allow me to “interact” with what I read, in a way. It makes me feel more involved, like I’m creating something, adding to the book to make it personal, as opposed to passively reading, thus helping concentration. And need I mention highglights make revision much quicker?

It’s therefore natural that I wanted to port this habit to the Web.

Tools for Web page notes and highlights

The tools come in various sizes and shapes, some online, some offline. Those I’ll mention allow you to actually save the page, which is really handy as Web pages have this annoying tendency to disappear after a while.

One offline, local tool I use extensively when reading long articles online is ScrapBook, a free Firefox plugin. With it, you can save Web pages or parts of them. It then allows highlights of multiple styles (configurable) and sticky notes, among other useful features. You can organize those clippings in a hierarchy and search through them. I use it so much I created special keyboard shortcuts for highlights; I described the procedure on my personal blog.

Screenshot of ScrapBook

If you’d rather have a cross-browser and online portable tool, there are a few Web 2.0-ish sites that have similar functionality. Some have the added benefit that clippings can be shared and therefore function as elaborate social bookmarking sites. For the basic functionality, you don’t need to install anything; a simple “bookmarklet” (a special kind of browser bookmark) does most of what you need.

Well known tools in this space are:

• Google Notebook: save pages or selections to your private notebook, you can then highlight and modify freely the clip as any other document. Really good for the editing features
• A.nnotate: allows you to import and edit PDFs and Word documents (among others) online, not just Web pages. There’s a paid version for heavy users. The PDF annotation feature seems particularly well done (I’ve had problems with multicolumn text with other tools, but it handles that very well)
• Diigo: been around for a while, strong accent on the community aspect.
• AwesomeHighlighter: very simple and clean. Just enter an URL and annotate. After you’ve finished annotating, it generates a short URL you can use to link to your annotated page. No community dimension for the moment, though.

Google Notebook screenshot

There’s also an even more impressive list of sites that allow “clippings” (selections) to be saved without the highlighting-in-place aspect, like Clipmarks.