Table of Contents and Navigation

[Marius]

I’m struggling with navigation. Let’s say I have a collection of essays and I want to go to a certain place in the book. How do I do that?

How do you read books that aren’t supposed to be read beginning to end?

Am I missing something?

This is another reason why we need a solution for reading pdfs. WIth a pdf, I know exactly what page to go to. The table of contents tells me. And I can go there quickly. I can also growse the book, if it’s a book with graphs or pictures.

[Steve]

I’m afraid Readlang isn’t great at this style of non-linear reading right now.

The current features which might help are:

• Chapter navigation: Chapters and Rich Formatting - Readlang Blog
• If you click the percentage at the bottom of the reading interface, there’s an option to “Go to specific location…”:
  
  
  
  (in this case, the “location” is the number of words + certain kinds of punctuation since the start of the text)
• The web reader Chrome Extension might be useful for this kind of content if it exists as web-pages instead of within a PDF: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/readlang-web-reader/odpdkefpnfejbfnmdilmfhephfffmfoh?hl=en

I do agree that PDF support would be nice for the reasons you state. It could be tricky to implement though.

[Marius]

Another use case is reading books with footnotes at the bottom of each page. Hard to read both the text and the footnotes unless reading the PDF. And there’s a lot of books like that, especially the older ones.

Any way to implement hyperlinking? Maybe it’s a box we click when we want the click to activate the hyperlink versus trigger the translation. So, you might check a box to navigate and then uncheck to read.

[Marius]

That’s what I was missing!

This is great!