thraxil.org:

speed reading

by anders pearson Mon 01 Mar 2004 10:08:24

<a href="http://trevor.smith.name/">Trevor Smith</a> wrote a neat little <a href="http://trevor.smith.name/EST/index.html">java applet</a> to help people speed read Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe". Joe Gregario does a good job <a href="http://bitworking.org/news/Cory_Doctorow_s_Eastern_Standard_Tribe">explaining what it's like</a> to use the applet. i thought it was a pretty cool idea, but its potential was limited by being a java applet. i immediately wanted to be able to use it to read any text file or webpage. i also wanted to be able to stop in the middle of a book, close the browser, and resume in the same spot days later. so i wrote up a quick python app that let me do just that. feel free to grab the <a href="http://thraxil.org/code/speedreader/speedreader.py">code</a>. it's pretty rough around the edges and the interface is ugly (especially the fonts), but it should be pretty straightforward. the html parsing is not guaranteed to be flawless; it just extracts all text from the &lt;body&gt; of the webpage and displays it. so if there's weird stuff like inline javascript, that will get displayed. i haven't tested it anywhere but on my linux box, but it should run on any system with <a href="http://www.python.org/">python</a> installed. if you can or can't get it running on windows or OS X, let me know.