The reading room

The reading room shows the text of one or more sources as continuous, reflowed text, one source after another in an order you choose. It suits reading several texts in sequence: letters in date order, say, or the works in a collection, or the texts an arrangement places under one heading. What you read there is each source's text, which is the transcription, edition or extracted text that Pangur holds for the item, rather than its page images. Reading in the reading room uses no model and costs nothing against your plan.

Opening the reading roomCopy Anchor Link

You can open the reading room from several places, and where you open it from decides what it reads:

A sequence holds at most 500 entries. If the list is longer, the reading room reads the first 500 and tells you how many there were, so to reach the rest you narrow the list with search or filters or select fewer items.

An entry with no text yet stays in the sequence and is flagged, so you can see what is missing. The rail beside the text lists the entries and how many there are. It is titled In this reading for a sequence and Contents for a single item.

Reading and moving through the textCopy Anchor Link

The reading room loads each entry's text as you approach it, and loads more as you near the end of what is shown. Continue reading and Show the text before this load more by hand, and choosing an entry in the rail jumps to it.

Each entry says where its text comes from ("Read from its file", for instance) and warns when the text may be unreliable, as when it was recognised from a scan and misreadings are likely, or when only part of the file could be read. Open in the library opens the entry's item. An entry from a corpus may also offer Open on the review desk (Review a reading).

When you open the reading room from Analysis, Back to analysis returns you there, and a corpus has Sources and Evidence tabs for switching between reading its sources and reading its records.

Finding textCopy Anchor Link

Choose Find in text or press ⌘F (Ctrl+F) to search. Pangur's server searches each entry's whole text, not just the part that has loaded. It ignores case and accents and needs at least two characters. The find bar shows your position among the matches ("3 of 41") with Previous match and Next match. When there are a great many matches it shows the first ones and says so.

Find searches up to 20 entries of a sequence at once. In a longer sequence it searches only the entry in view, and the field says which entry that is.

Copying a passage with its citationCopy Anchor Link

When you copy text from the reading room, Pangur adds a citation after it: the creators, title and date, the page or pages ("p. 12" or "pp. 12–14"), and a link back to the passage. You can therefore paste a quotation into another document without losing track of where it came from.

Highlighting in the reading roomCopy Anchor Link

You can highlight the text of an entry whose text comes from a PDF, with the same selection bar as the PDF viewer. The highlight is placed on the PDF page and appears there too. See Highlights, notes and assistant marks.

Reading settingsCopy Anchor Link

Open Reading settings to change how the text looks:

Two of these appear only when they apply. Manuscript lines is offered when an entry's text is a transcription of manuscript leaves, and As written keeps the manuscript's line breaks while Flowing text joins the lines into paragraphs. People, places and works is offered when an analysis has marked names in the text. The toolbar's Smaller text and Larger text change the size directly, and Reset reading settings returns everything to the defaults.

Reading settings are kept in the browser on the device where you set them, and are not shared with your other devices. In a private browser window they last only until the window closes.

Your place in the reading roomCopy Anchor Link

The reading room uses the same reading positions as the item's viewers, so Pangur remembers where you stopped in each file and your position follows you to your other devices. How positions work is explained in Read a source.

On the iPhone and iPadCopy Anchor Link

The iPhone and iPad app has its own reading room, which reads one item or several as one run. The rail is a sheet on the iPhone and a sidebar on the iPad. Its text size runs from 14 to 34, with 19 as the default, and its settings are likewise kept on the device. ⌘F opens find when a hardware keyboard is attached.

From an assistant or the command lineCopy Anchor Link

An assistant connected to Pangur can read the same sequences with the MCP tools reading_sequence and read_text. From a terminal, pangur reading lists or prints a sequence. See MCP tools and the command-line reference.