Reading a collection

Some collections are made to be read

When a collection is made of things people wrote — letters, stories, the long messages someone sends every Sunday — you can read it a page at a time instead of looking at a wall of cards.

Choose how to look through it

1. Open a collection from your circle.
2. Use the view buttons to choose Grid for cards, Book for a whole document, Table for rows and columns, or Listen for music.
3. Choose Read, when offered, to read a page at a time.

You only see views suited to the collection. Book needs an ordered collection suited to a book, Table needs values it can compare, and Listen needs available music. Changing views keeps you in the same collection.

Moving through it

1. Choose Next to go on, and Back to return. At the end of one chapter, Next carries you into the next one.
2. Under Contents, choose any chapter by name to go straight to it.
3. If there is more still to come, choose Show more underneath the contents.

The keyboard works too. Click once on the page you are reading, then use the left and right arrow keys.

Chapters are numbered, and they follow the order the collection itself is kept in — not the order the posts happened to be shared in.

Making the words bigger

Choose Larger text as often as you like, and Smaller text to come back down. There are four sizes, and your browser's own zoom still works on top of them.

Bigger words mean fewer of them fit on a page, so the number of pages changes with the size. You will not lose your place: you stay with the paragraph you were reading, wherever it now falls. The same is true when you turn your phone sideways or open the collection on a larger screen.

The words are the ones people wrote

Each chapter is somebody's own post, exactly as they wrote it, with their own paragraphs kept. When the post was a voice message, the chapter is what was said in it, written out. Nothing is shortened, tidied, or rewritten, and nothing is added in between.

At the foot of every chapter there is Open the original, which takes you to that post in your circle, where you can reply to it as usual.

Now and then a post has a photograph and nothing written with it. Those chapters say "This one has no words to read" — the picture is on the original post.

If something looks wrong

If a short message appears where the words should be — most often because somebody added to the collection while you were reading — refresh the page and it comes back.

A collection with nothing in it yet says so, and fills in on its own when someone shares something that belongs in it.