Pagination in reader

[MintPastille]

I read novels using the Pleco reader. It's quick, simple and provides a dictionary right when I need it, and one of my favorite aspects of it is that it's just black-on-white text all across the screen. No frills. There's one feature I'm missing though: pagination, or horizontal scrolling. When you read a physical book the text always stays in the same place, unlike when you're reading a scrolling page. This is fine if you're reading a newspaper article, but gets irritating when reading something longer. Most other reading apps offer pagination to avoid this.

I picture it being a global setting in Pleco, not a per-file setting. I wouldn't mind reading everything in the reader in a book-like horizontal scroll format. Other apps have flashy page-turning animations and such, but I think that would ruin the simplicity of the reader. Just a light fade-in/out or a quick slide would be enough.

Is this on the roadmap for the reader? Is it complicated to implement?

Thanks for a great app!

 

[mikelove]

I read novels using the Pleco reader. It's quick, simple and provides a dictionary right when I need it, and one of my favorite aspects of it is that it's just black-on-white text all across the screen. No frills. There's one feature I'm missing though: pagination, or horizontal scrolling. When you read a physical book the text always stays in the same place, unlike when you're reading a scrolling page. This is fine if you're reading a newspaper article, but gets irritating when reading something longer. Most other reading apps offer pagination to avoid this.

I picture it being a global setting in Pleco, not a per-file setting. I wouldn't mind reading everything in the reader in a book-like horizontal scroll format. Other apps have flashy page-turning animations and such, but I think that would ruin the simplicity of the reader. Just a light fade-in/out or a quick slide would be enough.

Is this on the roadmap for the reader? Is it complicated to implement?

Thanks!

Not too complicated, but not currently on the roadmap because we don't really think it's very helpful for reading Chinese, essentially because of the possibility of sentences and words spanning multiple pages. Chinese word order is often quite difficult to parse if it's not your native language, so having to go back and forth several times between two pages in order to get the gist of a sentence could be extremely frustrating, and single words that span multiple pages are even worse.

We can partially mitigate this through a little UI trickery, e.g. showing the first line of text from the next page / last line of text from the previous page grayed out at the bottom / top of the screen, and for single words at least the reader "bubble" could span pages and show you a definition for the entire word even if the second half of it was on the next page, but this is still going to be very awkward if you get stuck on a particularly challenging sentence or paragraph that happens to cover multiple pages.

 

[MintPastille]

Okay, I can see the reasoning. Having used other apps that offer pagination, however, I can say that I still prefer it. I guess it depends personal preference and language level. What do others think about this?

 

[stephanhodges]

I'd be in favor of a pagination feature if I could set the number of lines that were "carried over" from the previous page. I'd probably want to set it to somewhere between 3-5 lines, not the single line one expects. Having it default to one line wouldn't be an issue when it first "appears" as an option, as long as I could change it. :shock:

The range setting for # of lines could also have "1/3 page", "1/5 page", "1/4 page, perhaps up to "1/2 page". While I think 1/2 page is excessive, it might be useful on smaller screen devices and depending on the text being read.

Thanks!
Stephan

 

[mikelove]

I'd be in favor of a pagination feature if I could set the number of lines that were "carried over" from the previous page. I'd probably want to set it to somewhere between 3-5 lines, not the single line one expects. Having it default to one line wouldn't be an issue when it first "appears" as an option, as long as I could change it.

I think at that point we might start to see it taking up too much of the actual page - one of the primary benefits of page turning is having text stay in the same location on the screen (so your eyes can easily find a particular passage again), and if half the screen is taken up by text from other pages then that starts to break down. If we can come up with a reason to optionally support 2 lines, though, I suppose at that point supporting more wouldn't take much additional effort.

 

[gato]

More settings. Just what we need

I propose that every new setting in the future be accompanied by elimination of an existing setting.

 

[LantauMan]

More settings. Just what we need

I propose that every new setting in the future be accompanied by elimination of an existing setting.

Ha! I second that. How about a settings sequestration?