Better reading
Reading is important. And for me having a good setup to do so is equally important. On the first post of this blog I wrote about my journey to find the perfect reading setup. The tl;dr; is:
- I like taking notes and scribbling while I read. That’s why I like consuming content in my iPad
- But the Apple Books app for iOS sucks big time. It crashes[1] frequently and its search and organization capabilities are useless for me
- I switched to Reader and have been using it thus far
Reader is great. The team behind it has done a great job building a tool that covers most of the needs I have. But not the most important.
Over time I realized that most of the benefit I was getting from Reader was from its organization capabilities rather than anything else. There are many of the functionalities that I simply don’t use. I don’t usually take notes on the documents (with the keyboard), don’t use ghostreader, sync notes to a knowledge management app or use Readwise to revisit/learn from what I highlight. I tried all of these but none stuck with me. And what’s worse, because sometimes the imported content is missing images or other parts of the original, I have developed the tendency of reading the content in their original location, giving away the focus and distraction free environment that Reader provides.
So at this point I’m almost back at square one. Looking for a better reading setup.
Building my own
This wasn’t the first time I was toying with the idea of building my own solution but every time I pushed the idea back because of all the effort required. Or so I thought.
What I truly need is to convert html to something that I can write onto on my iPad and nothing else. Of course, my mind is buzzing with ideas and features that I could add but those are not what I need. At least for the first iteration.
So, what’s my solution to “convert html to something that I can write onto my ipad”
- “Convert html to something”. For this I’ll use Puppeteer and mozilla/readability. With Puppeteer I can progamatically generate PDFs from websites and with Readability I can get the “reader” (or decluttered) version of the pages I want to read
- “that I can write onto on my iPad”. I’ll use iCloud drive to get files into my iPad and pdfexpert[2] to annotate and scribble by hand
In use
To convert the documents I use either a command line utility or a chrome extension
In the true spirit of “progress over perfection” I took the example extension that google uses in their tutorial and simply added a button to it to trigger the page conversion. It works and that’s enough for now.
To help a bit with the organization I store the PDFs in folders per domain.
And finally I can go back to reading articles on my iPad, taking notes with the pencil. And I can open the same PDFs from my mac or iPhone and see the same annotations.