The point of Reading.js is to make it easier to read things—particularly long documents—online. For example, here's what Walter Ott's Modern Philosophy looks like with Reading.js.
The key bits are the scripts/reading.js script and the
stylesheets/reading.css stylesheet. When these two are included in
a well-structured HTML file, they add:
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Keyboard shortcuts
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Section folding
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Three color schemes (it defaults to a high-contrast mode, but try the Solarized-style themes.)
Feel free to download and modify this project to your heart's content
(seriously, please make it better). The stylesheet is written with
SASS; the
source files are in the sass directory.
If you just want to use the files with your own document, add these
two lines to the <head> of your HTML document:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://baruffio.com/reading.js/stylesheets/reading.css">
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://baruffio.com/reading.js/scripts/reading.min.js"></script>The above will include compressed versions of reading.js and
reading.css in your document.
I haven't tested any other .css file alongside reading.css; things
might get weird if you try to include another stylesheet.
The reading.html5 template can be used with
pandoc when
converting documents to HTML.
I designed Reading.js to use with the HTML documents that I make with pandoc. It should work fine with other Markdown-to-HTML converters as well. But it won't work with most HTML documents, because:
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Reading.js can only collapse sections of text that begin with a header element (
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5, orh6), and -
the header elements have to be direct children of the
<body>(that is, they are not enclosed in a<div>or any other element).
Reading.js just won't work if the header elements in your document are
differently formatted. (If you're using pandoc, don't use the
--section-divs option.)
The range-method branch of this project is an older version of the
script that hid content using JavaScript instead of CSS. That avoided
some of the limitations just mentioned, but was much slower.
These limitations exist because I'm lazy; I also only use Reading.js on HTML files made by pandoc, so I probably won't fix this any time soon. (Another reason for you to fork it.)
I doubt it. It seems to work OK in
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Firefox 15–16
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Chrome 21–23 (sometimes slow)
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Opera 12 (the "keyboard shortcuts" box looks weird)
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Safari 6
(All on Mountain Lion.) But beyond that I'm blissfully ignorant. Actually, lists look pretty wonky in Firefox and other Gecko browsers thanks to a bug that's old enough to be in junior high, so I guess you could argue it doesn't really work there after all. (Oh, and the same thing happens in Opera. But who uses Opera?)
Some browser extensions add invisible elements to webpages; this can screw up keyboard navigation.
This software may be used for any purpose whatever, but with no warranty or guarantee of any kind.