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Comment by anderskaseorg | Hacker News Reader

If you were to try this with real text that you wanted to read instead of lorem ipsum, you’d figure out pretty quickly why nobody wants text to rewrap like that as you scroll. Your eyes would have to rescan the text every time it moved to figure out where you’re supposed to continue reading, instead of just following it in a continuous line.

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From the author

> What would it be like to read text on such a device?

> Hell. it would be hell.

Among other similar statements. What’s the value in restating half the point of the article but presenting it as some big brained contrarian take

The author seems to be suggesting that the reason it’s “hell” and “horrible” is that we’re not “used to” it and it’s “rare”, concluding “it doesn’t have to be that way” and “we can go so far beyond that”. If that wasn’t your takeaway, then great—I wish there were more designers like you.

Yes. It reminds me of the bad old days of magazine layout in the 1990s and early 2000s, when graphic designers, armed with the latest desktop publishing software, roundly defeated the conservative forces of authors and readers.

Here’s a 1997 example at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.17.1997/page/n2...

Whatever you might think of that 1997 example, it’s not the same issue, since it’s just a static page. As the page scrolls vertically by 1 cm, the word you’re focused on predictably moves vertically by 1 cm. I assume your quibble is that you might have to follow an odd shape to find the next word at a line break—but at least you know where the current word is.

Whereas in this post’s animations, as the page scrolls vertically, the word you’re focused on also jumps to an essentially random horizontal position (as a discontinuous function of the scroll-dependent widths of all the previous lines). You can’t scroll without losing the place of your current word.

> it’s not the same issue

Thank you for the clarification. I had hoped that would be understood from my “It reminds me of…,” but I guess it wasn’t.

Oh god this is terrible.

Probably the best usability wise would be text that flowed around the window constraints as in here, but paginated instead of reflowing.

What if we squished the size of the text instead?

Raserise the text, map each pixel to a particle suspended in a fluid simulation, and let nature take its course. There's a reason they call it text reflow!

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