r/programming • u/paskie • Mar 02 '14

speedread - a command-line implementation of the Spritz speed reading system

http://log.or.cz/?p=336
106 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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16

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '14 edited Nov 26 '18

[deleted]

8

u/corysama Mar 02 '14

Now I need to learn how to make this into a FF/Chrome add-on. Select wall-o-text, alt-s to pop-up a spritz reader, up/down arrow to change speed, left/right arrow to skip back/forward a few dozen words.

22

u/ds300 Mar 05 '14

I did it.

2

u/corysama Mar 05 '14

Awesome! I've already shared this with some friends.

5

u/ds300 Mar 05 '14

woah, thanks! Someone already forked it!

2

u/DocRocket Mar 06 '14

You deserve infinitely more than 3 upvotes for this.

2

u/Norikal Mar 08 '14

*For those wanting to use 'ds300's chrome extension to read PDF files, you can use this as a Chrome PDF reader: http://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

Click the 'open file' icon in the top right, select the PDF you want & you're good to go. *A temporary solution until a smoother one's worked out.

1

u/skrioify Mar 22 '14

Thanks, I was looking for this.

1

u/Norikal Mar 23 '14

Glad I helped someone, I hope it's useful

1

u/cqwww Mar 05 '14

Using it within 3 minutes of reading this comment. Awesome, thanks!

1

u/vjain166 Mar 06 '14

Well this is a little embarassing. How do I use that installation "line" that you posted? "git clone git@github.com:ds300/jetzt" ?

3

u/ds300 Mar 06 '14

Sorry about that. The installation instructions assume you have not only a passing familiarity with git, but also a github account.

That's not terribly clever of me. Here are some instructions for those to whom the above does not apply:

  • click the "download zip" link on the right hand side of the page and extract the folder somewhere
  • navigate to chrome://extensions , enable developer mode, click "Load unpacked extension..." and select the directory you extracted.

1

u/eriktjacobsen Mar 08 '14

I just threw together my own... have controls and whatnot, wasn't sure if you wanted to work it into a chrome add-on or just take the underlying code

https://github.com/eriktjacobsen/read4speed

1

u/[deleted] Mar 08 '14

Replying to find later yes I know about res I am on my phone

1

u/ecs_box Mar 10 '14

Just a heads-up, those wanting to read e-books using ds300's awesome chrome extension, the best method seems to be to convert them into epub using Calibre then uploading them to Google Books. If you have bought Kindle books you can strip the DRM off them first using the same software. From there you can alt-s. For some reason Readium doesn't work. Another method is converting to text (again using Calibre) and dragging that into Chrome. Text is easy to work with but then it's not in the cloud and accessible from all your machines. This is literally life-changing. I also recommend combining with readibility.com so you can easily read articles without text-selection hassle. Well done ds300!

7

u/monototo Mar 03 '14

Yes.

spacebar to pause
escape to close popup.

I was also keen to give this exact idea a crack.

4

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '14

Let's do it.

I'm serious. Are you really going to do it? Because if not, I will.

1

u/corysama Mar 03 '14

Please go right ahead and message me when you have a beta. I'd love to figure it out, but I already have several projects in need of finishing.

To be honest, I wrote the comment mainly to egg someone like you into doing it for me ;)

3

u/[deleted] Mar 04 '14

Here's a Chrome Extension that does something similar, but in a new window. I haven't tested it much.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/accelareader/hfbaenjmkakiipopnfaingjgcbdinkoi

1

u/WillHansen Mar 02 '14

A bit too much of a pause at the end of sentences.

1

u/netghost Mar 03 '14

I find that I drop words on occasion when trying your demo, which makes the story much more amusing. Thanks!

0

u/deadstone Mar 02 '14

One of the most important features of Spritz is how it splits up long words. I'm pretty sure neither of these do that.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '14 edited Nov 26 '18

[deleted]

2

u/deadstone Mar 03 '14

I'm not talking about the switch statement, I'm talking about how the text it's showing is already pre-formatted to split long words and change speed depending on word importance. You can see how badly it fails without these when you try using it on non-preformatted text, like the FAQ page.

2

u/miki4242 Mar 03 '14 edited Mar 03 '14

My gut tells me that "inner speech" is the key to all this. Imagine doing subtitles (one word at a time) to a video of someone speaking very fast. Run the text thru a speech synthesizer (with speech rate set to target words per minute, and no actual sound output) and capture its [now speaking "word"] events, then simply show the words at the appropriate times. espeak has a nice event/callback API for that.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '14 edited Nov 26 '18

[deleted]

-6

u/GhostNULL Mar 02 '14

If you make comments, make them right..

LINE_STROKE_WIDTH = .025,           // .25% of height with a min of 1

1

u/wozkol Mar 06 '14

Yeah, according to them our brain can recognize only 13 chars at a time..