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, Timeline for posts by date, Table for rows and columns, or Play for music and videos.
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, Timeline needs posts with a date, Table needs values it can compare, and Play needs music or videos to play. Changing views keeps you in the same collection.

Looking back by date

Choose Timeline to see the collection's posts on the day they happened. Four buttons at the top change how you look through it:

1. Days shows the posts day by day.
2. Months shows one row for each month, with a bar sized by how many posts it holds, such as "12 posts". Choose a row to open its days, and choose it again to close them.
3. Years does the same, with one row for each year.
4. On this day shows posts from today's date in earlier years, with how long ago each year was. Birthdays and anniversaries in the collection that fall on today are there too.

You can open as many rows as you like at once. If nothing in the collection happened on today's date in an earlier year, On this day tells you, for example "No posts in this collection from October 21 in earlier years."

Moving through it

1. Choose Next to go on, and Back to return. At the end of one post, Next carries you into the next one.
2. Under Contents, choose any post 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.

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

At the foot of every post 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 say "This one has no words to read" — the picture is on the original post.

Items someone typed straight into the collection are there too, in their place among the posts. There is no post behind them, so in place of Open the original the item shows what they typed, with Added by and the name and profile picture of the person who added it.

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.