Is the forum format important, with the separation between posts and the profile pic and info on the side of each post? Cause if not I would love to have an epub version of this so I can read it on my kindle, might even find a way to create it myself if it doesn’t exist yet.
I hope so! I myself bounced off of Mad Investor Chaos twice before because the formatting was too hard for me to read… but after implementing this reader, spent 2 hours last night reading through it.
This is pretty great. One remaining issue is that it seems harder to hold onto your place if you stop in the middle of a section and then reload the page.
I’d love a download option, but for now I’ll use your reader to read it. I saw there’s an option to make the text window wider, which is nice. Is there a way to make the text background dark?
One more thing, currently the box doesn’t fully fit on my screen vertically when it’s open (I’m using a laptop that doesn’t have a high resolution). Is there a way to make the open box fit on the screen?
I have a kinda-opposite problem. There’s a “wide mode” but not a “tall mode”, and for reasons beyond my understanding the box with the actual content in it is about half the height of my browser window. I can understand why you wouldn’t make it full-width by default—very wide text can be hard to read—but I can’t think of any reason for preferring less than (full height minus reasonable margins).
Personally, for width I would prefer something intermediate between normal and “wide” (given the actual dimensions of my browser window, which occupies half of quite a large monitor) and for height I would prefer All The Pixels. Would it be difficult to have a “manual control” mode where you can set width, height and font size arbitrarily?
I see it’s some way behind the current state of the story. Is that because there’s some background thing that fetches only every so often, or because there’s a cacheing layer that might be stale, or what?
[EDITED to add:] I guess it’s reading from the epub on Dropbox?
Yeah probably a stale caching layer, what fic were you reading? Glowflow doesn’t read from an epub, it’s reading html from the site itself.
Lemme try rebooting to see if that refreshes. That’s obviously not sustainable… I didn’t expect people to actually use it for a live, updating fic lol.
Edit: added a “Clear cache” button, hope that solves it!
Currently some way behind again; clicking “clear cache” does do something that looks like reloading but doesn’t make it not be some way behind.
[EDITED a couple of days later to add:] No change to what the reader is showing since then even though there have been updates on glowfic.com. The “clear cache” button doesn’t appear to help. Forcibly reloading the page also doesn’t appear to help.
Right now, what happens when I go there is that I get “Oh no. Error running app. If this keeps happening, please contact support.” (In both Firefox and Chrome, on Linux. It was OK earlier today. I have Firefox configured to disable most Javascript but have whitelisted the domains I think the app actually needs, and again it was working OK earlier today, and Chrome doesn’t have any of the JS-blocking stuff.)
The only possibly-useful-looking thing in the Javascript console says “INITIAL → (10, 0, undefined) → ERROR”.
This is how it looks now when I increase the width. The outer box doesn’t widen together with the text and background, and the text doesn’t stay centered. Also, dark mode seems to have stopped working.
Hm, do you have “dark mode” toggled on the sidebar? (There’s two settings unfortunately due to how Streamlit is set up):
The outer box doesn’t widen together with the text and background, and the text doesn’t stay centered
Yeah unfortunately this is mostly working-as-implemented. The box size isn’t a thing I can change; “Wide Mode” lets it the box be big, otherwise it’s small.
Text centering might be possible if you’re in “Wide Mode”—I’ll look into that.
Somewhat. The profile pic changes based on the character’s emotions, or their reaction to a situation. Sometimes there’s a reply where the text is blank and the only content is the character’s reaction as conveyed by the profile pic.
That said, it’s a minor enough element that you wouldn’t lose too much if it wasn’t there.
On the other hand, it is important for you to know which character each reply is associated with, as trying to figure out who’s talking from the text alone could get confusing in many scenes. So any format change should at least preserve the names.
So perhaps the character names could be kept, maybe the pictures too (though I don’t know if there’s a good way to include so many pictures in an epub format, it’s not exactly built for having small images beside the text, as far as I know), but not the authors names. Cause though it’s nice knowing who wrote what, it’s also confusing because everyone uses special usernames and I don’t yet know which name is the author’s name and which is the character’s.
The author’s (user)name is always the final line of the inset box. If there are three lines in that box (e.g. “Carissa Sevar // to-let-you-in // lintamande”), then lintamande is the author, Carissa Sevar is the character, and “to-let-you-in” can be ignored (it’s some sort of thematic tag for the character).
Authors other than the main two don’t appear for an extremely long time so I’d worry about that after getting that far :)
One way to preserve the pictures and the general format while making the story more easily readable is simply converting the books into PDF. At least you could read them on a tablet, which is easier and less distracting than PCs. Tablets’ screens are also much better for reading than PC monitors, even if they aren’t as good as Kindles. It would be a good compromise, I think.
Tablets’ screens are also much better for reading than PC monitors
Oh, really? What’s the difference between them? I did notice that I like reading on my tablet better (I use it as my kindle) but I thought that it’s because I’m using a black background.
Small screens emit less light and consequently less of the blue light that tends to disrupt a proper sleep cycle than large screens do.
Yes, the smaller size of the tablet is cancelled out by the fact that people tend to hold it closer to the eye with the result that just as much of the light coming directly from the screen enters the eye, but in the case of the larger screen viewed further away, there is much more indirect light (e.g., light that has bounced off the walls of the room) entering the eye.
(As the amount of light entering the eye increases, the pupils constrict in compensation, but at the intensities used for reading at night, the compensation is only partial if my experience and careful observation of myself is any indication.)
Also, many on this site are nearsightedness (because nearsightedness is correlated with intelligence). Nearsightedness would be my guess as to the cause of his/her belief that “Tablets’ screens are also much better for reading than PC monitors”.
Is the forum format important, with the separation between posts and the profile pic and info on the side of each post? Cause if not I would love to have an epub version of this so I can read it on my kindle, might even find a way to create it myself if it doesn’t exist yet.
https://github.com/rocurley/glowfic-dl
I liked how the epub strips out unnecessary UI from the glowfic site, but downloading and moving epubs around is a pain...
So I built a web reader on top of this code! Check it out here: https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main
It’ll work for any Glowfic post actually, eg https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main?post=5111 Would probably be simple to add a download button to get the epub file; source code here.
Oh, huh! I can see that format potentially being preferred by a number of people.
I hope so! I myself bounced off of Mad Investor Chaos twice before because the formatting was too hard for me to read… but after implementing this reader, spent 2 hours last night reading through it.
Thanks so much for writing this Glowfic!
This is pretty great. One remaining issue is that it seems harder to hold onto your place if you stop in the middle of a section and then reload the page.
Thanks! I tried splitting into smaller sections (half the size) so that we don’t have this issue as much; not sure what other solutions look like.
Ah thanks, that was helpful.
Nice!
I’d love a download option, but for now I’ll use your reader to read it. I saw there’s an option to make the text window wider, which is nice. Is there a way to make the text background dark?
Your wish is my command—dark mode added!
Awesome! Thanks!
One more thing, currently the box doesn’t fully fit on my screen vertically when it’s open (I’m using a laptop that doesn’t have a high resolution). Is there a way to make the open box fit on the screen?
Hrm, I think I could code in a way to specify the height of the box… lemme look into it.
Thanks for all your suggestions, btw!
I have a kinda-opposite problem. There’s a “wide mode” but not a “tall mode”, and for reasons beyond my understanding the box with the actual content in it is about half the height of my browser window. I can understand why you wouldn’t make it full-width by default—very wide text can be hard to read—but I can’t think of any reason for preferring less than (full height minus reasonable margins).
Personally, for width I would prefer something intermediate between normal and “wide” (given the actual dimensions of my browser window, which occupies half of quite a large monitor) and for height I would prefer All The Pixels. Would it be difficult to have a “manual control” mode where you can set width, height and font size arbitrarily?
Done! Thanks for the feedback. Hoping 2000px is plenty but it’s easy to increase lol.
(Having too many options is sometimes a symptom of bad UX design, but it seems reasonable for a web reader to support these all of these.)
Nice!
I see it’s some way behind the current state of the story. Is that because there’s some background thing that fetches only every so often, or because there’s a cacheing layer that might be stale, or what?
[EDITED to add:] I guess it’s reading from the epub on Dropbox?
Yeah probably a stale caching layer, what fic were you reading? Glowflow doesn’t read from an epub, it’s reading html from the site itself.
Lemme try rebooting to see if that refreshes. That’s obviously not sustainable… I didn’t expect people to actually use it for a live, updating fic lol.
Edit: added a “Clear cache” button, hope that solves it!
Currently some way behind again; clicking “clear cache” does do something that looks like reloading but doesn’t make it not be some way behind.
[EDITED a couple of days later to add:] No change to what the reader is showing since then even though there have been updates on glowfic.com. The “clear cache” button doesn’t appear to help. Forcibly reloading the page also doesn’t appear to help.
I was, unsurprisingly given context :-), trying to read the latest Planecrash: https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main?post=5930
Right now, what happens when I go there is that I get “Oh no. Error running app. If this keeps happening, please contact support.” (In both Firefox and Chrome, on Linux. It was OK earlier today. I have Firefox configured to disable most Javascript but have whitelisted the domains I think the app actually needs, and again it was working OK earlier today, and Chrome doesn’t have any of the JS-blocking stuff.)
The only possibly-useful-looking thing in the Javascript console says “INITIAL → (10, 0, undefined) → ERROR”.
Sorry about that—had some configuration issues. It should work now!
Yup, all working (and apparently up to date) now. Thanks!
This is how it looks now when I increase the width. The outer box doesn’t widen together with the text and background, and the text doesn’t stay centered. Also, dark mode seems to have stopped working.
Hm, do you have “dark mode” toggled on the sidebar? (There’s two settings unfortunately due to how Streamlit is set up):
Yeah unfortunately this is mostly working-as-implemented. The box size isn’t a thing I can change; “Wide Mode” lets it the box be big, otherwise it’s small.
Text centering might be possible if you’re in “Wide Mode”—I’ll look into that.
Text centering should now be live!
Late to the party but: I’d love an option to adjust line spacing!
Somewhat. The profile pic changes based on the character’s emotions, or their reaction to a situation. Sometimes there’s a reply where the text is blank and the only content is the character’s reaction as conveyed by the profile pic.
That said, it’s a minor enough element that you wouldn’t lose too much if it wasn’t there.
On the other hand, it is important for you to know which character each reply is associated with, as trying to figure out who’s talking from the text alone could get confusing in many scenes. So any format change should at least preserve the names.
Would a play format work? e.g.
“Iarwain (languidly): I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lintamande”
Someone would have to translate the various profile pictures into emotions, but I would expect there to only be a handful of them per character.
Planecrash has 307 images at the time I made this comment, for context.
So perhaps the character names could be kept, maybe the pictures too (though I don’t know if there’s a good way to include so many pictures in an epub format, it’s not exactly built for having small images beside the text, as far as I know), but not the authors names. Cause though it’s nice knowing who wrote what, it’s also confusing because everyone uses special usernames and I don’t yet know which name is the author’s name and which is the character’s.
The author’s (user)name is always the final line of the inset box. If there are three lines in that box (e.g. “Carissa Sevar // to-let-you-in // lintamande”), then lintamande is the author, Carissa Sevar is the character, and “to-let-you-in” can be ignored (it’s some sort of thematic tag for the character).
Authors other than the main two don’t appear for an extremely long time so I’d worry about that after getting that far :)
“Iarwain” is Eliezer, “Lintamande” is his co-author, and IIRC that’s basically it for most of the story.
If you don’t want to bother using the glowfic downloader yourself, here’s the epub so far. My intention is to update it every day, but no guarantees.
I’m also thinking about writing such a script. Beautiful Soup is the perfect lib for the job.
One way to preserve the pictures and the general format while making the story more easily readable is simply converting the books into PDF. At least you could read them on a tablet, which is easier and less distracting than PCs. Tablets’ screens are also much better for reading than PC monitors, even if they aren’t as good as Kindles. It would be a good compromise, I think.
Oh, really? What’s the difference between them? I did notice that I like reading on my tablet better (I use it as my kindle) but I thought that it’s because I’m using a black background.
Small screens emit less light and consequently less of the blue light that tends to disrupt a proper sleep cycle than large screens do.
Yes, the smaller size of the tablet is cancelled out by the fact that people tend to hold it closer to the eye with the result that just as much of the light coming directly from the screen enters the eye, but in the case of the larger screen viewed further away, there is much more indirect light (e.g., light that has bounced off the walls of the room) entering the eye.
(As the amount of light entering the eye increases, the pupils constrict in compensation, but at the intensities used for reading at night, the compensation is only partial if my experience and careful observation of myself is any indication.)
Also, many on this site are nearsightedness (because nearsightedness is correlated with intelligence). Nearsightedness would be my guess as to the cause of his/her belief that “Tablets’ screens are also much better for reading than PC monitors”.