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Pro Reader
future of text edition

 

 

We are planning to produce the most powerful PDF reader for academic documents as a way to demonstrate some of the potential of richly interactive text for The Future of Text book and to be of useful value in itself.

 

Starting with an initial focus on interactions for reading academic & scientific documents gives us a specific focus on a real-world work-flow which can instantly be transferred to any serious documents. Reading academic documents for a researcher is a different process to reading a book, social media or newspapers and thus requires a different tool set. The tools required need to augment the reader's ability to evaluate whether the document is worth reading (is it relevant and credible?), how it fits with other works/documents in the field, what is it trying to communicate and whether this is useful and accurate and how best the reader can use the document in their own work through citing it.

 

The update will take features from Liquid | Author also be made for iOS. It will be augmented by the Visual-Meta approach to provide a richer document format.

 

Minimum Requirements

 

The minimum requirements are the ability to Copy as Citation with multiple author chapters (see ‘Citing’ below), to perform Citation Evaluation in Context and iOS implementation (current version is macOS only). We can deliver for Windows, Android and/or Linux if the cost can be covered externally:

 

Document Evaluation In Context

 

The document needs to be evaluated based on what the reader already knows about the field. This happens when the reader comes across the document which can be in conversation with colleagues, during general browsing and while reading another document where the document in question is being cited. It is last use-case Reader addresses.

 

  • minimum requirement: Users will be able to click on a citation in the body of the document to produce a pop-up with information about the citation including a summary/abstract and rankings, as well as a download link. This will be developed in collaboration with Scholarcy.com

 

 

Critical Comprehension

 

Comprehension is the largest area for augmentation innovation with aspects including how the user navigates the document, changes views to accesses further information and integrates the work into their own through annotating it:

 

navigation

 

  • Type a number without any other action to jump to that page
  • Type text without any other action to start a search

 

views

 

Advanced views on well-formed, modern PDFs.

 

  • Select any text for Find to see only sentences with the selected text. Keep headings in this view to make it easy to see what text is in the current article and what is in different parts of the book {from Author} [implemented]
  • Pinch for outline {from Author} + Dynamic View based on section headings and body text keywords {from Author} (advanced) [implemented]
  • Pinch out when at normal reading level to enable ‘Flow text’ as can be done in Liquid | Flow (to break on command, double break on period etc. for better legibility in heavy blocks of text) [cannot easily be done since PDF presents lines not sentences]
  • Stretch Goal: 'Interactive' Dynamic View screenshots in document from Dynamic View in Author (exported as image maps etc. using Visual-Meta)
  • Stretch Goal: ML/AI analysis of document for colour coding of text (experimental), based on grammar or subject

 

access information

 

  • Select any text for Liquid Flow options {as implemented in Author}
  • Stretch Goal: Glossary Support
    • Author builds a glossary over time, by posting simple 'glossary' Category terms to their Wordpress blog:
    • Export/Publishing
      • On Export to a PDF all the Glossary terms used in the document are imported inot the Visual-Meta
      • On Export to Wordpress tags are created
    • On reading a user can mouse over text for a pop-up describing the term with a link to read the full glossary entry

 

annotation

 

  • Annotations are saved in the document and made available to the Finder to allow the user to search only annotated or commented text, rather than only original body text. This can also be made available for other software to develop document overview systems

 

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Citing

 

  • minimum requirement: Select and copy text to Copy As Full Citation, including location information and high-resolution addressing, to allow next reader to open to that page and knowledge of author of that section, not just editor of book (includes relative addressing) {from Author, using Visual-Meta }
    • Includes support for copying from documents with different authors of different sections either with or without an editor.