💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~nehrman › gemlog › 2020-12-29-Formatting.gmi captured on 2022-01-08 at 14:18:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A while ago I saw the tanelorn city public library and tried to read through some books they had on offer and found that Amfora really isn't well suited to reading book-length text files. Without bookmarking, or any real way to track progress other than remembering key words, it was an awkward reading experience.
I found that I do however read blogs and other short writings very productively on Amfora, and I really want a way to read longer texts from the comfort of Amfora. Because of this, I decided to start my own online library, but with only hand-formatted gemini documents. I started off with two essays, one by Kroptokin and one from the creators of the Anything That Moves zine.
Recently I started work on one of the big books in anarchism - Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. I startred this one off differently, creating a table of contents that links to a separate page for each chapter. I feel like this is a good starting point for length per page, from which I can adjust later to find the perfectly digestible amount of a book that a reader can not be intimidated by or get lost in. In my brief experience with the format so far, it feels a little on the long side, but definitely an improvement over the whole book. I also found that the block quotes in the book serve as great resting points for the mind and landmarks for the eye to navigate the text.
In the future, I think I'd like to add more of these landmarks and stopping points. Maybe I further subdivide chapters into a predefined digestible size.
If you have any suggestions, tips, or feedback on the current format, please send them over to me at giantnoah@gmail.com
Thanks and have a great one
-Noah