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Are you looking for a better way to read long text files, proposals, documentation, eBooks and the like? Today's MDJ had a note about a free utility called Tofu that I decided to try out. I'm quite happy that I did.
The basic premise of the application is that online documents are hard to read because they're typically displayed in a single wide column and moving through a document vertically causes a loss of context as the text is scrolled vertically. In the authors words:
So why not just take a normal window and make it narrower, scrolling down as you need? Well, there are usually a lot of lines in a text, and all look more or less the same, so if they move past your eyes vertically, they are difficult to keep track of. The text doesn't feel stable, and you get lost easily.
Even though I wasn't totally convinced about the narrow columns versus wide column argument, the horizontal movement ideas seemed sound. Certainly that was one of the reasons I started pushing lots of things to PDF and reading them in Preview... once the window size and position are setup appropriately, paging through a document using left and right arrows is quite convenient.
So off I went to try it out.
It appears that the theory is sound.
The text is laid out like a virtual book, with the column widths set by preference and the number of columns being determined by the window width. Auto window resizing worked pretty well in the limited tests I used (better than many other applications). I had to fiddle with the font and column sizes a bit to get what I was after, but I did eventually find a combination that works on all my monitors pretty well.
You can use any combination of mouse wheel and keyboard control (up/down, left/right, spacebar and probably a lot of others) to move around, although the wheel moves parts of pages which I found a bit disorienting. If things get stuck mid page, left or right will align the 'pages' again.
After a couple hours, my eyes started getting tired (bothered?) as they inevitably do when reading on a bright white background so I looked for a preference to play with the background colors and sure enough, it had one (a big win in my book). I normally use a background color scheme close to manila in Eudora and something a little bit more pinkish in BBEdit. I ended up with something a lot closer to gold in Tofu, but it seemed to work and was a lot more like old paper than 'blind me' white.
The image above is a couple pages from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea which I'm still working on in fits and starts. I read another seven or so chapters in Tofu after getting bored with work and work related reading.
The most interesting thing I noticed was that I started reading online documents a lot like a book. I'd read the two pages on screen, then hit the space bar twice to move to the next pair of pages. If there was a loss of context during the transition, left arrow would get me to the last page and I could transition with old and new on screen at once, reminiscent (but not identical) to flipping a page.
I've tried out its handling of RTF files, which work as expected but haven't yet thrown any Word files that way (I don't think it will care too much for all the tables we use in some of our reference documents).
Even if it weren't free, I'd pay a small fee for Tofu. Since it is free, by all means go get it now.
And thank you Amar Sagoo for such a useful utility.
Posted by Dave at June 26, 2004 06:23 PM