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How to Use

David Keane edited this page 2026-06-09 03:34:37 +01:00

Table of Contents

• How to Use
• The 5-second start
• Keyboard shortcuts
• The three modes
• Word mode — the classic RSVP
• Sentence mode — comprehension grade
• Paragraph mode — preview / postview
• Drag-and-drop a .txt file
• Converting PDF papers to text
• macOS / Linux (with poppler-utils)
• Windows
• From the command line on any platform with Python
• What does NOT work well
• Where your data lives
• Speed-reading tips that actually work
• When NOT to use Ranger Reader

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How to Use

The 5-second start

1. Open ranger-reader.html in any modern browser. Double-click on macOS / Linux / Windows works.
2. Paste text into the textarea at the bottom, or drag any .txt file onto the page.
3. Press Space (or click ▶ Play) to begin.
4. Tap 1, 2, or 3 to switch reading modes.
5. Slide WPM up or down to taste — default 500, range 200–1500 (some users push to 3000 in Sentence mode).

That's it. Everything else is shortcuts and small touches.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
Space	Play / pause
←	Skip back (10 words in Word mode, 1 chunk in Sentence / Paragraph modes)
→	Skip forward (same)
1	Switch to Word mode
2	Switch to Sentence mode
3	Switch to Paragraph mode
+	Increase WPM by 50
−	Decrease WPM by 50
R	Reset to start of text

Spacebar to start / pause is the most-used shortcut by far. It's the one to remember.

The three modes

Word mode — the classic RSVP

Single word displayed in the centre of the screen, replaced every (60/WPM) seconds. At 500 WPM that's a word every 120 ms; at 1500 WPM every 40 ms.

Use for: fast skim, getting the gist, the "wow I'm reading at 4x normal" mode. Comprehension drops above ~700 WPM for most readers without practice. Practice helps.

Sentence mode — comprehension grade

One full sentence displayed at a time. Display duration auto-scales by sentence length (longer sentences get more time). An ORP anchor letter appears near the middle of the sentence, coloured red, to give your eye a fixation point.

Use for: methods sections, results, anything where you actually need to remember what was said. Sentence mode at 1500 effective-WPM beats Word mode at 1500 for retention, every time.

Paragraph mode — preview / postview

Whole paragraph at once, generous display time. Reads like normal text, just larger and centred.

Use for: previewing a section before you commit to reading it carefully, postviewing for quote extraction, deciding whether to skip a paper entirely. Also good for poetry / prose that loses meaning when chopped into words.

Drag-and-drop a .txt file

Drop any .txt file onto the reader page. It loads instantly, replaces whatever was in the textarea, and auto-detects paragraph breaks. No upload step — the file never leaves your machine; it just gets read into the page's FileReader API in your browser.

Converting PDF papers to text

Ranger Reader takes plain text. Academic papers are PDFs. You need a one-time conversion step.

macOS / Linux (with poppler-utils)

# Install once:
brew install poppler                 # macOS
sudo apt install poppler-utils       # Debian / Ubuntu

# Convert:
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt

The -layout flag preserves the visual layout — that produces cleaner output for most academic PDFs. Drop the .txt onto the reader page.

Windows

Either install poppler via Chocolatey (choco install poppler), or use any online PDF-to-text converter and download the .txt result.

From the command line on any platform with Python

pip install pdfminer.six
pdf2txt.py input.pdf > output.txt

What does NOT work well

• Two-column papers — pdftotext can read them in column order if you use -layout, but sometimes interleaves text. Sanity-check the first paragraph of the output.
• PDFs with no embedded text (scanned / image-only) — you need OCR first (tesseract is free). For most modern academic papers this isn't an issue; for older scans it is.
• PDFs with extensive equations or figures — equations come out as nonsense glyph strings; you'll want to skip past them in the reader (use →).

Where your data lives

Everything is in your browser's localStorage under one key. Open DevTools → Application → Local Storage to see the raw blob. The reader auto-saves:

• The current text you pasted
• Your chosen mode (Word / Sentence / Paragraph)
• Your chosen WPM
• Your current reading position in the text

Close the tab, open it again tomorrow, hit Space — the reader picks up exactly where you left off. No login, no sync, no cloud. Just your browser remembering for you.

Speed-reading tips that actually work

1. Start at 500 WPM in Word mode for ~5 minutes. That's your baseline calibration.
2. Bump 50 WPM at a time (+ key). Stop when you feel like you've stopped comprehending — that's your current ceiling.
3. Switch to Sentence mode at your Word-mode ceiling x 1.5. You'll usually find Sentence mode comprehension is better.
4. Use Paragraph mode for previews — read the abstract, conclusion, and section openers in Paragraph mode before committing to a full read.
5. Don't fight the ORP letter — let your eye snap to the red character and trust your peripheral vision to handle the rest. This is the whole game.

See The ORP Anchor for why the red letter matters.

When NOT to use Ranger Reader

• Anything where prosody matters — poetry, lyrics, dialogue. RSVP destroys rhythm.
• Code samples — RSVP cannot parse indentation. Read code in your editor.
• Anything you need to take notes on as you read — you can't pause-and-write quickly enough at 1000+ WPM. Use Paragraph mode and old-fashioned linear reading for note-taking sessions.

RSVP is a tool. Use it where it helps; don't force it where it doesn't.