About layout shifting, latency, and explain text

General
1

### 1.

I observed that in the “underline” mode, the impact on typography is already the smallest—compared to the other two options, it takes up less space and is less likely to push the bottom text to the next page. But I wonder why we can’t change that thick line into a thin line, and shrink the translation font size to insert it into the gaps?

Originally, I really wanted this software to have a scrolling reading feature, simply because whenever I want to look back at the previous content on the page, I find it has already been pushed to the previous page. If I flip back, everything gets messed up because all the translations reset, making the layout more compact, which makes it very hard for me to find where I last read. Also, if a sentence is broken up at a page break, it is hard for me to see the whole sentence completely.

However, if scrolling is not added, simply letting the translations not mess up the typography would perfectly meet my requirements—at least it would keep a piece of text in the same position consistently. For aesthetics and to avoid looking crowded, the translation font could be shrunk while slightly lowering its opacity (just a small suggestion).

### 2.

Additionally, I observed a phenomenon: if I don’t do any operation on a page for a long time (often less than 2 minutes!), then when I click a word again, the time it takes to translate becomes much longer, around 8 seconds, whereas it used to be less than 0.5 seconds.

Thank you, author, for making such a practical software; it has improved my reading ability very quickly. But now, when I don’t need to look up words most of the time, having to wait so long for an occasional lookup is honestly quite frustrating.

### 3.

Next is the “explain” part, where I want to add a feature to look up words within the text. I think if this contradicts certain principles, we could actually add a shortcut at the bottom of the translated explanation. This could quickly upload that content, create it in the library section, and open a new tab to let me jump in. This would also be a great solution.

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2

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

1. Have you tried “Popover” mode? It’s under Style in the AA tab of the reader page sidebar. Rather than inserting the translation into the line, it floats it above the text, so the layout underneath doesn’t move at all and your reading position stays put.

There’s no scroll mode at the moment, partly for technical reasons. Readlang is optimized for novel length texts and to be just as fast and responsive on those as on short ones, and putting a text like that into one huge scrollable display would slow things down a lot, at least the way it’s currently engineered.

For a sentence that gets split at a page break: while dragging to translate, if you hold over the last word on the page, everything shifts up one line to make room for an extra line, which lets you translate a phrase that runs past the end of the page.

2. I’ve made a change which should remove most of this delay. Please refresh your Readlang browser tab and let me know whether you still get the long wait after leaving the page idle for a couple of minutes.

3. This one is now implemented, as of a month ago (this reply). You can click on words and phrases within an explanation to get a translation, as long as the explanation is in your learning language.

Please let me know how you get on.