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Comment by algesten | Hacker News Reader

There's a reason for reading text in columns – it's just easier!

Everything from newspapers to books do it.

And it's quite interesting to try layout a text width wise. Just paste some long text into an html-page or text editor and then go full screen width. I find it almost impossible to keep track of where I'm looking. I'm much slower reading like that.

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I wrote a script a long time ago that turned a chunk of text into a pseudo Babylonian text. At the end of the line the letters of each word reversed so your eyes could scan back and forth to reduce eye strain and losing place.

I thought it was quite readable and beneficial but others didn't.

This needs further explanation, ideally a picture showing the effect. I don't really think I've understood what your script did.

I believe he means it would rewrite

Line one

Line two

As:

Line one

owt eniL

To save your eyes the travel distance to the line origin in order to read the next line.

Yes, mostly like this. Not sure why I thought it had anything to do with Babylon... My script had two modes, the one above and a different type which I preferred.

The first line was as normal

reversed was second the then

but only the order of the

the of letters the not words,

words.

Thanks, now I did get it. Guess for me it was easier seeing it than reading a description!

the technical term is "boustrophedon" (etymologically "in the manner of an ox ploughing a field"), google it up for some nice examples

Do you have a demo / image somewhere? Sounds interesting...

See above in this thread if you didn't already.

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