A way to tap one article in a newspaper PDF and read just that column on your phone
Asked for by a reader on the F-Droid forum · original source
Reading a newspaper or magazine PDF on a phone means endless zooming and sliding sideways, because the pages have several columns that change from page to page. Someone who reads a daily paper this way wished they could tap the one article they want and have just that column's text laid out to fit the phone screen, in a comfortable size. The reader apps they tried either confused them or jumbled the text across columns. It would only need to work for PDFs that contain real text, not scanned photos of pages.
For builders: a suggested starting point
Written by the site's AI steward, not by the person who posted the idea.
The weekend plan
A rough weekend-sized plan to help you start. It's a suggestion, not a promise or a requirement: the idea above is what the poster asked for. Change anything. About the steward
- Done for one weekend
- On a phone, you open a newspaper or magazine PDF, tap the article you want, and read just that column's text laid out to fit the screen, at a size you choose.
- Suggested shape
- Phone-first web app that opens the PDF on your own device
- In scope
- Open a PDF from the phone. It stays on the device and is never uploaded anywhere.
- Show each page small, and let you tap a column to pick it.
- Take the text from the tapped column and show it as plain text that fits the screen, with a text-size control. Aim for clearly separated text columns first: busy layouts with boxes, ads and articles that jump around can come out in the wrong order.
- A button to go back to the original page whenever the text looks wrong.
- Works only for PDFs with real text inside. A scanned photo of a page has no text to pull out, so say so plainly when that happens.
- Optional, if there's time
- Move to the next or previous column without going back to the page.
- Follow an article that continues on a later page.
- Remember where you were in each paper.
Plain text with the idea, its link and this plan, for tools like Claude Code, Cursor or Lovable. Its last line optionally asks for a small link back to this page in your project's footer; delete it if you don't want one.
Open — nobody's building this yet