Programs for Reading Text Files?

dotpl asks: "Recently I acquired a number of books in text format from Project Gutenberg and archived them for later reading. When I came to read, I realised how hard it is to read text files on the computer screen, so I thought about developing a 'reader' that you can read text files with, selecting the fonts and colors you like, and which has a bookmarking feature - a la Vim - so you know where you were reading before. Then I realised that a software of the sort must already exist. How do you read big text files without suffering from severe eye strain?" While a browser may go a long way to providing the necessary functionality, most browsers bookmarking facilities are sorely lacking for this type of work, since they don't mark the position in the page, just the page, itself. Has anything like this been written?

Comments

"Has anything like this been written?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's called lp. Or lpr. Take your pick.

If you truly want to save your eyes, this is by far the best solution. I don't care what kind of monitor it is, or how good the fonts look. Staring at a monitor produces considerable eye strain. Staring at properly illuminated paper does not, to nearly the same degree.

But I sympathize with the desire to save paper and ink. Hopefluly someone else has a good solution along those lines...

eye strain

[Spudley]

It has always struck me as odd that so many people seem to think it's a good idea to read books on their computer screen. With the eye-strain problems of current display technology, I simply can't see how anyone could even contemplate it.

Until there is a display technology available that doesn't have this problem, you're better off printing it. Rather use up a bit of paper and ink than damage your eyes.

Re:eye strain

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they are, but CRTs being like dull lightbulbs isn't the reason. CRTs basically flash on and off really fast (really old ones do it at 60Hz, most people don't notice the flickering above 75 or 85 Hz), while LCDs display the image constantly. There's other differenced between the two, like sharpness (LCDs win in this), color (your viewing angle effects the color you see on an LCD, so if you need super-accurate color LCDs suck), refresh rate (a lot of old LCDs change their pixel states too slowly to keep up with video or games or other onscreen motion; good new ones are vastly better, but some people still notice it).

Before anybody starts an LCD/CRT flame war, please go and actually use both kinds. All too often I see people bashing LCDs because they saw a laptop back in '94 and decided that LCD tech sucks and will never improve, ever. Same goes for people who hate CRTs because they've never run theirs at higher than 70Hz, or have only used 10 year old blurry, worn-out ones. Don't base your judgements on tech by the cheap-ass generic crap sold at CostCo.

Fundamental problem

[babbage]

I'm not sure if I'm on the wrong track here, but I definitely feel out of step with the other comments I've seen so far. It seems to me like your main problem isn't so much the software you're using as it is the display technology itself, yes?

This is a pretty well known & documented UI shortcoming with contemporary screens: between the fact that the typical monitor is backlit (thus, you're staring into a lightbulb the whole time -- and a flickering one at that) and the very low resolution compared to print (isn't typical resolution on the order of 72 dpi? that's worse than a cheap bubble-jet printer...), reading long texts off a CRT or LCD display isn't comfortable for most people. It's been written that this resolution issue is making computers a lot more uncomfortable for people than most folks realize, and that only with better screens (reflective instead of back-lit, and resolutions of say 1000dpi and higher) will reading electronic displays come to feel as comfortable as paper does for the average user.

I forget if I read about this in some of Jakob Nielsen's stuff, or Donald Norman, or maybe someone else, but in any case it's a matter that UI specialists are aware of. Last time I was reading about this -- a year or two ago now, maybe a little longer -- it was estimated that such technology is still a decade off, and I'm not sure how much progress has been made since then. Probably not much.

My favorite idea for dealing with this is the "electronic paper" being tested by groups like Xerox PARC and E-ink, where a sheet of this paper-like film has a matrix of particles that can, depending on the charge being applied to different parts of the matrix, arrange themselves to display arbitrary text or images. The idea is to figure out how to make a high quality version of this stuff that can be mass produced & sold for little more than traditional paper, so that a computer of the future might end up looking a lot like the books of the past, with the pages for the display and the computing components in the spine. That way you could have whole libraries in a portable format, textbooks (or Gutenberg texts :) could be downloaded & students would keep the same "book" from class to class, you could scribble notes on it for your own reference, or maybe even have it recognize what you're writing & use a stylus instead of a keyboard, etc. But aside from all the neat potential aspects of such a device, one of the explicit goals in trying to build it would be to end up with an electronic display format that is as comfortable & familiar as paper.

Re:Fundamental problem

[krilli]

"thus, you're staring into a lightbulb the whole time -- and a flickering one at that"

i just want to know why everyone says that having light from a lightbulb flickering at 60hz reflected into your eyes via a sheet of paper is inherently better than having a monitor flickering at your eyes directly ...

(if lightbulbs flicker at all, that is ... do they? or is the filament glowing steadily?)

anyway, what I do when i'm reading text off the computer screen is

a) I reduce the length of the lines

our vision system has a hard time tracking lines longer than X words. this is what makes you "miss" sometimes when you're moving your eyes to a new line.

b) increase the contrast to maximum, decrease the brightness all the way down (or as far as it will go down) and use a gamma control to even things out a bit (for Linux, the "gamma" and "xgamma" commands - in Windows / MacOS, the Adobe Gamma control panel. if you have access to a hardware color calibrator gadget, use that).

if you do this, i promise you that you will have so much fun reading from your monitor, you'll even be digging up your old .txt ascii-porn files from that bbs way back when ...

QREAD

[almightyjustin]

Project Gutenberg has a utility for exactly this purpose called QREAD. It's available here.

my tips

[Tumbleweed]

You know, I've long found that using light text on a black background relieves much eyestrain - so much less radiation hitting your eyeball, plus a nice high contrast. If you run at really high resolution (and up your font size), the letters are really well-formed, too.

Using a sans serif font also helps readability on computer screens (the opposite of readability on paper - apparently this is accredited to the low dpi on computer screens).

Try changing settings to suit your own preferences, and don't _ever_ just blindly accept any program's default settings - especially for how things are displayed - everybody's pattern recognition psychology is unique in one way or another. Change fonts and font sizes, change screen resolution, vary the contrast (light on dark, dark on light), etc. Make sure you're using proper lighting in the room you have your computer in. These things all make a big difference, and each can vary a fair amount for each individual.

Have a day.

Re:my tips

[Tumbleweed]

Well all I know is that light on dark makes my eyes hurt _much_ less. Keep in mind that not all studies are perfect, and that study you mentioned may have been old enough to not be valid with modern displays - they may have misinterpreted what was causing problems. Also, note that the ambient lighting would also change those results _drastically_. Test out both methods, and with alternate lighting, to find out what's best for YOU, and don't rely on information you've read elsewhere.

palmreader

[retsamxaw]

I use a program called palm reader for my Palm. It keeps bookmarks, and it's portable. Many are talking about the issues with PC monitors, but I think a huge ergonomic issue is that you can't "curl up with it" like you can with a book or a magazine.

In the meantime, use a Mac or Windows

[GCP]

I realize that's sort of a flamebaity thing to say in this audience, but there's just no comparison between the quality of text on a Mac or Windows and on Linux.

I use Linux for work and for fun, but I always set it up so that most of my interaction with it is via a terminal program running on Windows. Many of my coworkers use Macs to access their Linux (and other Unix) machines, and I'll have to admit that the text on their Macs looks a little better than on my Windows machines.

None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago.

I expect Linux to catch up in the next five years or so (I sure hope so, because I'm using it more and more), but it's pretty hard to look at currently. I don't want to have to keep relying on some other OS to provide a tolerable window into my own Linux box.

Re:In the meantime, use a Mac or Windows

[Mr. Slippery]

None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago.

Odd...I find that text on my Linux box is much more readable than on a Windows machine or Mac. (Ugliest text I've ever seen was defintely on a Power PCMac I had on my dekat at one job.)

Of course, part of it is using the right font for the job. I use Lucidia Typewriter, a lovely fixed-width sans-serif font, in my emacs and terminal windows, and it's a joy. In my browser (galeon), I get to use fonts that aren't fscked up by "anti-aliasing" (worst idea ever - making characters blurry does not increase readability!)

If you're trying to use some WYSIWYG word processor or something, there may be more of a problem - but that's a fundamental issue that fonts that work on paper don't work on screen, and vice-versa.