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The last page is too hard to read.


When you get to the last page of an article, it nearly never is a full page. When you page to that page, the display scrolls up just enough to fill the page; but your eye has been trained to move to the top of the page to read further. As a result, you lose track of where you were and have to waste a lot of time skimming the page to figure out where you left off.

If there were _any_ way to make it so the last page scrolled up to put the place you left off at the top of the page (yes, this means that on average most of the last page would be blank), you would do your readers a great service.

As it is now, reading the last page of any article is like reading a paper article with a misprint, where multiple paragraphs from the next to last page are repeated on the last page.

Surely I can't be the only one that finds this behavior maddening?

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5 Comments

  • I love this idea
  • I totally agree. So does Tim Bray, he wrote a blog post about this today: tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2011/11/26/…

    A simple way to address this in Readability would be to add a full blank page of whitespace at the end of articles. Then the browser will let you scroll down on that last page and keep your place.
  • If you know a little bit of CSS, you might try out a wonderful Chrome extension called Stylebot. It lets you add your own custom styles to all pages on any site.

    For what you're describing, this might do the trick:

    div.article-actions.extra-padding {
    padding-top: 30em;
    }

    stylebot.me/
  • Thanks for the suggestion of Stylebot. I'm using it to add a blank page at the end and am definitely liking how it improves the experience on the last page.
  • Hi there

    I wrote a little JavaScript library called "overleap.js" today. Please check it out on github.com/bekoeppel/….

    overleap.js adds a spacer div at the bottom of the page, with a dynamic height. On scrolling, the spacer is expanded and shrinked so that a full length page jump is always possible.

    Regards,
    Benedikt