jQuery Forum

With proper CSS, you can do the 2 column display, and with jQuery Pagination  you can change the long page into a "paginated" page.

I don't get it. Not from that drawing. It's a pretty drawing, but it doesn't show me what the user sees.

@watusiware: Well, basically, I want to turn reading an html article into something like reading an epub file for end users. Here is a design I made (it's in Vietnamese, but I hope you get the point):

If possible, I would NOT want everything pre-loaded, because for image heave articles, it could take forever to load. 

You can’t do it in javascript. 

@Jake: what a downer :( any chance I can use jquery to display some sort of "loading screen" to buy time until the entire article is loaded completely?

Do you have a server language that could portion out the pages?

I just found Booklet - jQuery Plugin . It looks promising!

@jake: the booklet one looks sweet! Think it can be turn into a responsive reader? 

A server program can't split up the pages, because it doesn't know the size of the screen, the font size, exactly how things are rendered on the particular browser, etc.

A server language could be PHP or Java or Python or other. They could read the "book" and send one "chapter" at a time. That would make it mobile friendly and decrease the initial load time. But it would not play well with the plugin.

@watusiware: you just solve another problem of mine with that dotdotdot plugin :))

It’s just an if statement to tell how wide the screen is. The plugin handles it both ways, but not automatically.

jquery.booklet.latest.js is the only javaScript you need to read. You can swap it out for jquery.booklet.latest.min.js when you go into production.

Dunno about the css region though. One of my friends tell me to stay clear of it.

Perhaps it was this one?

I found jquery - how to display only right page using booklet plugin? - Stack Overflow . So it would have to be a kluge to get it to go single page.

You might be better off serving a PDF and letting the native/plugin PDF reader handle it.

There are some Javascript PDF viewers. I don't know much about them, but I just encountered one.

Western Digital uses it on their site. I was just shopping for drives.... Here's an example. It is slow as molasses on my old AMD64 Linux box with Firefox 20.

Here's an example. (Note you may not get it if you have Acrobat installed...)


    http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.pdf


I'd bet it uses the canvas.

Of course, this is not what you want to do. PDF authors usually want things just as they have written them, and they expect users to scroll around or zoom to see everything if it doesn't fit. As I understand it, you want the text to flow to fill what is available at the selected font size.

But the two problems have some similar requirements. Your requirement is harder, though, because you need automatic page layout. That's a tough problem they've been working on for 30 years or more. Some day they will figure it out.

Kindle is getting better at it. It is not there yet. The readable Kindle books have been hinted with markup by humans to indicate where page breaks may or may not occur, etc. Are you willing to do that with your material?

The self-published books where the author did not have the time or could not afford the effort can be very hard to read.

Kindle can flow PDF documents. Kinda. In an ugly way. I downloaded a cookbook on hydrocolloids done like that. It's hard to follow. I can never tell which recipe goes with which picture. The page numbers make no sense, you can't correlate them with paper books.

(Even so, I get all my tech books on the Kindle app on my iPad.)

I use https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?embedded=true&url=… for devices that don’t show PDFs well.