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submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I realize that I don't use prolewiki too often for reading because, let's be honest, there's a lot of clutter on a web page that you don't have when reading a physical book.

To help remedy that, the first phase of my plan is to create a "reading mode" that will remove all clutter from the page and basically let you read uninterrupted. In later phases, as skills and software permit, I will also look at saving your place in the page in some way (maybe a % read bar so that you know where to scroll to when you come back), AND, one thing I've always wanted to do, allow users to highlight text and add notes locally so they can annotate PW books for themselves.

But one thing at a time.

For the time being, this is what the reading experience looks like on desktop (mobile is already pretty clean so I'm not touching that):

And this is a barebones version of it, with just text basically:

We can of course then think about potentially making it more interesting (maybe doing a sepia mode to reduce blue light, or allowing the gear icon to come back so people can open dark mode or change width) but that's extras on top. I also have to think about how you'd get that mode on and off.

For the time being though, is this something you feel like you'd use or prefer over the 'vanilla' interface when reading on ProleWiki? Would it make you more inclined to use prolewiki to read books on?

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[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

FWIW, most browsers already have a reading mode. Critique of the Gotha Program seems to work fine in “reader mode” on Firefox. That might not be helpful for huge tomes like Capital, Volume 3, though, because it’s all on one page, and browser reading modes don’t have tables of contents.

One notion is to also offer the library documents in one or more open ebook formats, particularly EPUB.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I like doing our own features because you never know what plugins/browser a person is using, or if they're even aware their browser has the capability. Though we have our own dark mode but a lot of people aren't aware of it because it's hidden behind the gear icon in the sidebar lol

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

This is cool but I still prefer my eReader for long texts. If my eReader had a web browser I'd use it for sure. Do I remember there being an option in the works to download an epub file for books in the wiki?

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

We briefly had the feature working, but it broke down because the plugin itself is not super stable. It needs to contact a server to create the pdf etc. I tried fixing it by running our own PDF service as per the documentation but it never worked lol, and the error codes are non-existent so I don't even know where to start looking.

In any case it's still on the backburner because it was a really cool feature. There's other plugins but they only allow single pages, maybe I could look at that in the meantime as a temporary fix though. The one we had allowed you to create an entire book with select pages which was pretty cool.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah that's a bummer. I feel like something like https://pandoc.org/ would be more effective, but then you're building a custom tool for that.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Supposedly the plugin we use works with pandoc but yeah, 0 documentation and 0 error solving lol. The devs are on hiatus and we don't even know why or if they plan to come back to it or what.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Uhg that sucks! Pandoc is dope. It can be a real pia though.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Super useful, thanks! Other than saying this, I'm only here to advocate for that sepia mode as an extra, when possible!

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It's as simple as adding a CSS Rule body{ background-color: blanchedalmond;} (super tasty color btw). But of course there needs to be a button to activate it, maybe in the gear settings.

edit- I'm 90% of the way there, just need to find a way to store it into localstorage so it saves across pages, also disable it if you go back to light or dark mode, and just finetune the CSS so it does the colors correctly across elements, but aside from that it works great!

this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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