Readwell

Radwell is an attempt to create web-based documents that are more readable than standard web-based documents.

Computers have traditionally presented the user with with a one-column layout. This was no problem in Times where a standard screen was about 80 characters wide. Modern computer screens often have very hight resolutions and thus can display very long lines in a still appropriate font-size. The current Wikipedia layout produces lines of about 150 characters which is about triple of the recommended line-lenght of 40 to 60 characters. In HTML documents, lines tend to take the maximum width available, this often results in poorly readbale websites.

Recently many websites have addressed this problem by adopting a design that resticts the line-lenght to a more readable length. Unfortunately those designs still only have on column. The reader has to scroll constantly and it's quite easy to loose your orientation in such a document. Dividing the document up into multiple documents with shorter columns adresses the problem of getting lost in a document but adds the problem of navigation: the reaader has to use non-standard site specific navigational elements and has to wait for new pages to load. So it is clear that this layout actually wastes precious screen real-estate.

In print publishing this problem has long been solved by simply using a multi-column layout. This uses all the paper real-estate but also guides the reader. On the desktop this problem has been addressed by Tofu, a column based text reader application that is meant to read lenghty text documents like books from Project Gutenberg. Readwell is very much inspired by Tofu and is thus aimed at mostly long text based documents like books or articles.

As it is not easy to find out how many columns a give text needs and how to distribute the text amongst the different columns, readwell fills the columns word by word and checks if the height is still in the given bounds. This method is very inefficient and becomes quite slow for long documents. The biggest problem is that readwell does not display already processed text on the fly but only does this at the end of the rendering process.

Readwell is clearly only a quick hack or proof of concept in its current state: it is slow, and full of bugs. Actually it is not really a good idea to attempt to do this formatting on the client side. It could probably be done more effectively by the server side. To scroll in readwell you can either use the buttons in the top right corner of the screen (which will always stay on the same place) or you can of course use the scroll bar of your browser.

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