Ask HN: Do you have trouble reading long documents online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have trouble reading long documents online?

5 pointsprawn14 comments

On a daily basis, I find myself struggling to keep my place while reading a long document online. I don't know if many others do it, but I find myself selecting a portion of text so as to mark my place if I have to answer the phone, reply to an email, etc.

When reading a book, all I have to remember is "right page, second paragraph". On the web, the page of a lengthy article might be thousands of pixels long and the current screenful/viewport is changing as the page is scrolled.

So I'm curious to know if anyone else has the same problem, and if there is a best practice solution as a developer and as a reader?

Many of us share an intense dislike for documents split into tiny pages (usually for the purposes of bumping up ad views). Even without ads, waiting for the next page to load (given that 90% of the load will be for surrounding junk) isn't that fun.

Do long documents need more pull-quotes, horizontal rules, section titles or some other method of separating areas?

Added: TL;DR - I struggle to keep my place when reading long documents. Wondering if others have the same experience and if there's a solution.

Yes. I paste long documents into Microsoft Word, adjust the line spacing, print to a laser printer, then use a mechanical staple gun (see PaperPro).

The environment thanks you. :)

I also have the habit of selecting a couple of lines to mark where I stopped reading before doing something else. Or even when I'm just scrolling down, to make sure I don't scroll too much.

But I don't seen anything wrong with reading online versus reading a long pdf document. As long as the text isn't split in a lot of small pages that take 15 seconds to load, it's ok.

Anyone ever built a per-tab horizontal/slider bookmark as a Firefox add-on?

I also do that select-before-scroll thing.

I reduce window width to give a comfortable column with where the document allows, then use scrolling as a place-marker. I'm a line or two down from the top of what's displayed.

I'll also cut and paste into a plain text editor, adjust font, etc. to suit, then read that offline.

First method usually works, until you're on a site that auto-refreshes to inflate ad views. I don't trust many large content sites not to do that!

NoScript and AdBlock Plus may help with that. Even if the page is using a META refresh, NoScript has an option to kill those.

I've sidestepped the issue and just use instapaper on my iPad and iPhone to read long articles. Instapaper holds my place for me between sessions, so I don't have the pain of remembering where I am.

If I don’t see myself finishing an online article in one reading, I’ll just Instapaper it and carry on with my Kindle, where it will save where I’ve left off.

I was exactly searching for such a tool and ended up building an FF jetpack adddon a couple weeks back. I'll find sometime this weekend and push it online.

I have trouble reading long documents anywhere. :-)

This is too long, where's the tl;dr?

Can appreciate that this probably serves as a joke as much of a helpful reminder, but I've added TL;DR for those short of time anyway. ;)

Yes, it was just a joke, I'm sorry :). If anyone really did need a tl;dr for THAT, they're probably not the people you want answering this question anyway.

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