Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by welder | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

welder·

Try this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/lca...

It color codes lines aiming to solve missing or loosing your place while reading.

View on HN

Admittedly, I didn't try it in any real world setting, but my gut reaction was horror. Even reading through the example paragraph, I did not find the gradients as useful landmarks.

But it does make me wonder if other forms of spatial landmarks could be employed in large paragraph text. Perhaps enlarge the start of each, if only for a couple of words, in a way that quickly tappers back to the normal text height. Extreme run-on sentences might require subclauses to be highlighted similarly. Line spacing should accommodate the extra needed height, but remain regular, making the whole document appear double spaced.

At least, that is the picture in my head. It might not do any better than this Beeline reader.

+1. The gradient just makes the page look confusing, and my eyes gained none of the imagined advantage of "you were just looking at red, so look for red... look for red... there's the next line!"

I might actually like it better if it just colored one line red, the next line blue, and so on. Absolute positioning instead of all this clever gradient stuff.

Thanks! I gave it a quick whirl and couldn't get it working on websites. It never captured the proper text (e.g., on latimes.com).

I'll try it out tonight.

It was hastily written for a 24hr hackathon so yea it can be improved. It finds the largest block of text on the page and assumes that's the important content. If the comments section is larger than the article text, the extension incorrectly uses the comments.

If you find it helps your reading please email me and I'll take time to improve and fix it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com