The discussion revolves around the idea of implementing a fullscreen reader mode in Discourse, as proposed by terraboss. This feature would allow users to focus on reading long posts without distractions and adjust font sizes for comfort. terraboss also suggests adding a highlighting feature for private notes and public sharing.
codinghorror expresses skepticism about the feature’s usefulness, while schungx supports the idea, citing the benefits of reading modes in browsers. Falco suggests using the /print feature or keyboard shortcut as a workaround, but terraboss finds this inadequate.
schungx shares a common use case where reading mode would be helpful, and Falco explains that implementing a native reading mode is impossible without a DOM event from Apple. schungx suggests using markup/CSS to enable reading mode, but Falco clarifies that this is not feasible due to the way Discourse loads posts.
The conversation concludes with schungx acknowledging the limitation and jordan-vidrine sharing a theme component for reader mode. terraboss provides additional context with a YouTube link.
Hello together!
Following idea for a new usability feature:
In my workflow, I’m using Discourse to spend much time with reading. Most of these posts can become very long, due to the fact, they are about legal questions There are long cases and much longer “solutions” of them.
What I’m really missing is an integrated reader mode. Safari e.g. won’t allow me to enable the browser reader mode (Why?). The default text size is okay for short texts and quickly reading them. But for real focusing on content, there is soo much “wasted” (often empty) space.
In addition to that, maybe - just maybe -, it would be a veryyyyy sexy feature in addition to that, if the user will be able to add highlights on text passages. Maybe some one colour for private notes and one for publicly sharing.
It’s good for just reading. Many browsers have reading mode and some html trickery to turn it on. Reading modes take up less resource on the browser and they can be in font sizes that is comfortable to individual.
Not really. I just wish, this tiny button would work as expected and shows me the full text of each topic I’m currently reading. Not just randomly selected / pre-loaded ones.
New too. Quite a few times I was reading long topics on meta and by reflex presses the reading mode button, then realized that it didn’t work on this site.
Let’s say, I have five topics that I’m interested in reading. I don’t want to read them one by one or I’ll forget about them, or their order will shift. I don’t want to bookmark them because it is a hassle.
In this very common case, I’ll just load each topic in a separate tab. Clean and tidy. Except that it uses up a lot of resources on mobile. The perfect solution is to press reading mode in each and turn them into text, as after reading I won’t need it to go back. I’ll just close.
Unless Apple provides a DOM event for reader mode, that we can cancel, redirect you to the /print version of the topic and then trigger again for you, this is impossible.
Isn’t there already certain markup/css stuff that can mark certain elements in a particular page as the context text? If a page is loaded and the browser finds those tags, it will enable reading mode, AFAIK…
There are long cases and much longer “solutions” of them.
