Enhanced Reading Page Builder

Marking speakers

Start a line (or a passage) with a speaker tag in brackets. Everything up to the next tag belongs to that speaker:

[internal] My parents screwed me. They put their beliefs above my future.

[nnedi] "Are you done whining already?"

[external] I glared at the screen and said nothing.

Two special tags style the narrator: [internal] (thinking) and [external] (speaking/describing). Any other tag — e.g. [nnedi], [fancy hair] — becomes a named speaker and gets its own highlight color. Blank lines start new paragraphs.

Explanations (teacher notes)

Add a note that readers reveal with the Explanations toggles. Use [explain-1] for a note in Support Language 1 and [explain-2] for one in Support Language 2. ([explain-en] and [explain-es] also work and mean the same thing.) The note runs until the next tag:

[explain-1] The narrator is anxious but is pretending to be calm.

Bold and italics

Wrap text in asterisks for emphasis: **bold text** and *italic text*. This works in the reading and in explanation notes. Other markdown (links, lists, # headings) is not supported and appears as typed.

Chunking (collapsible sections)

Break a long reading into sections students can expand one at a time. Start a section with [chunk] (auto-numbered) or [chunk: Day 1] (your own title). Everything up to the next [chunk] goes inside it. If you use no [chunk] tags, the reading stays as one flowing piece. Chunked readings get Open All / Close All buttons, and printing always includes every chunk’s text, open or not. They also get a Print each chunk on a new page checkbox, for handouts where every section should start on its own page.

Loading a vocabulary list

The Load … glosses from a file buttons in the Vocabulary section read a word list, so you do not have to type it in one word at a time. Each line holds one word (or phrase), written the way it appears in the reading, followed by its gloss. Any of these shapes works:

tumultuous - disorderly or noisy
tumultuous = disorderly or noisy
tumultuous: disorderly or noisy
tumultuous, disorderly or noisy

A list copied from a spreadsheet, or exported from Quizlet, has a tab between the word and the gloss, and that works too. So does a spreadsheet saved as CSV, with the words in the first column and the glosses in the second. A numbered or bulleted list is fine (the numbers are dropped), and so is a heading row such as Word, Definition.

For two languages, either load two files — the Language 1 file first, then the Language 2 file, whose glosses are matched to the words already listed — or load one spreadsheet with three columns (word, Language 1 gloss, Language 2 gloss) using the Language 1 button. In a Language 2 file, the word at the start of each line is still the word from the reading, not its translation:

tumultuous - tumultuoso, ruidoso

Loading never removes a word, and a word that is already listed has its gloss replaced by the one in the file, so load a corrected list again any time. A Word or Excel file cannot be read directly: save it as CSV or plain text first, or copy the list and use Or paste a list instead. A note under the buttons says how many words were loaded and lists any lines it could not use.

Save the word list, under the list, writes every word and both glosses to a CSV file that opens in a spreadsheet, so a list built for one reading can be kept, corrected, and loaded into another.

Saving your work and sharing it

Save this form to a file, near the top of the page, puts everything you have entered — title, rights, languages, text, vocabulary, pictures, and the Word handout choices — into a single builder file (.json). Open a saved form puts it all back, so you can stop and come back later, make a version for another class (save it under a new name), or rebuild the page after changing a gloss. Pictures chosen from your computer are saved inside the file; pictures linked by web address are saved as the address.

A builder file is also the way to share a reading with another teacher so they can adapt it — a built reading page cannot be reopened here, but its builder file can. Opening a file replaces what is on the form, so the page asks first if you have typed anything. The same rights apply as to the reading itself: sharing a builder file shares the text in it.

Nothing is left out quietly. Before saving, the page checks that the file will open again in full; if something is too long to come back (a gloss over 2,000 characters, say), it names it and asks before saving. Opening a file or loading a word list says exactly what, if anything, could not be used, and building the page lists any vocabulary words that will not appear in it — a word with no Language 1 gloss, or one the text never uses in that exact form.

Pictures

Add a graphic in the Graphics section below, give it a short label, and put the label in your text where the picture belongs:

[image: market]

Pictures behave like every other support — they stay hidden until a reader switches Show Graphics on, so the same page works with or without them. Put the tag on its own line, between paragraphs. Text after it keeps belonging to whoever was speaking before it, so you do not need to repeat the speaker tag.

For a small picture inside a sentence — a symbol, or a picture of a word set beside the word itself — use the inline tag instead, right at the spot it belongs:

She filled the basket [image-inline: basket] and went home.

An inline picture is scaled to the height of the text around it and sits in the line like a word, so it can go mid-sentence without splitting the paragraph in two. It shows no caption — a line of text has no room for one — so anything the reader needs to be told belongs in the sentence itself. Everything else is the same: same graphic entry, same alt text, and it still waits for Show Graphics like every other support. The same picture can be used both ways in one reading.

A picture chosen from your computer is shrunk (to about 1200 pixels on its long side) and built into the page, which keeps the reading a single file that works with no internet — the same reason the styles and scripts are built in. Each photo adds roughly 100–250 KB. A picture linked by web address adds nothing to the file, but the reading then needs a connection and breaks if the address stops working.

Alt text is required. It is the sentence a screen reader says in place of the picture, and what shows if the picture fails to load. Describe what matters about the image here — “A crowded outdoor market at noon” rather than “a photo”. The caption is optional and is shown to everyone, so it should add something the picture does not already say.

Mind who owns a picture, the same as with your text: a photo found through a search is usually someone else’s. Wikimedia Commons, Openverse, and public-domain collections are safer sources, and they say what credit to give.

Copyright and licensing

Each reading page you build carries whatever rights line you pick in the Rights for this reading menu, and nothing else — no Creative Commons badge is added unless you ask for a CC license. That is deliberate: the text you paste in is not this tool’s to license. It may be yours, it may be a living author’s, or it may be old enough to be in the public domain, and only you know which.

The default, all rights reserved, is the safe choice and the right one for a copyrighted text you are using in class. Pick free to copy for classroom use for something you wrote and want other teachers to use, a Creative Commons license if you want to publish it on terms anyone can rely on, or already in the public domain for an old text (roughly, published before 1930 in the US). No rights line at all leaves the rights line out so you can write your own.

Every reading also carries one small credit line naming this tool and where to find it, so a colleague who receives the file can come and make their own. That line says nothing about who owns your text, so it stays even when you choose no rights line.

Copying someone else’s text into a reading does not change who owns it, and this menu cannot grant rights you do not have — adding glosses and speaker tags makes an adaptation, not a new work. Classroom copying of a copyrighted text is usually fine under fair use; publishing it on the open web usually is not. When in doubt, share the reading with your students rather than posting it publicly.

This tool itself, and the code it builds into each reading, are separately licensed (Creative Commons BY-SA and CC0 — see the bottom of this page). That covers the tool, not the words you run through it.

Sharing with students as a PDF

Google Drive and Google Classroom do not display raw HTML files, so for handouts use the reading’s Print / Save as PDF button: open the saved reading, switch on exactly the supports you want students to see, click the button, and choose “Save as PDF” as the printer. Only the supports that are switched on appear, printed in colors chosen for white paper, and the PDF lists them under the title — so you can save several differentiated versions of the same reading (say, one plain and one with glosses) and tell them apart later. The PDF is a snapshot: chunks print open, and students cannot change the supports. Keep sharing the HTML page itself when you want students to use the toggles.

Word / Google Docs handouts

The Word Handout (.docx) section at the bottom of this page downloads the reading as an editable Word file. Unlike the PDF snapshot, it can be reworked — add comprehension questions, cut sections, reflow it into a worksheet — and Google Drive converts it into an editable Google Doc. Tick the supports to include; chunks become headings, each starting on a new page unless you untick that (the first chunk shares the title page); untick In color for black-and-white photocopies. Pictures you chose from your computer are embedded; pictures linked by web address, and SVG drawings, are left out with a note.