Show HN: A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things

6 pointsposted 17 days ago
by oleksg
(tryquincy.live)

9 Comments

pavelpilyak

17 days ago

Looks great! Per-page assistant works for llm cost, but complex docs (actually, almost any professional books) are all about cross-page context (definitions, relation between two related pages) - how does it answer something that isn't on the current page, but related to one?

oleksg

17 days ago

sadly non of that right now. I think down the line I'll hook it up to an optional context/memory layer, so that it has an idea of what you've read so far. (lots of local open-source options iirc)

As you read, pages would be broken down and fed into this layer.

mmarian

17 days ago

I have a similar problem in having limited attention span when it comes to learn. I went into it from the opposite angle - just plan out what I want to learn, then start asking Claude to design the content for me. It's worked pretty well.

oleksg

16 days ago

actually thinking about... even now it's hard to capture my attention while reading. maybe I add some sort of awards/badges and custom-set progress system (per session) into this. Really trying to deal with the attention span issue hmmm

mmarian

16 days ago

Doubt badges work. You have to ask yourself why you're struggling to read it, and work from that. And remember, not all problems can be solved by technology.

oleksg

16 days ago

interesting, do you have it reference some book? or just straight talking to claude?

mmarian

16 days ago

Just straight talking to Claude without referencing a book. However, if I wanted to learn from a book, I'd probably follow the same approach and just send the book across.

mklifelife

17 days ago

Local-first products seem to be getting more attention lately. Privacy and speed are becoming strong selling points again. What made you decide to build a standalone reader instead of a browser extension?

oleksg

17 days ago

I wanted to be able to use this online on flights easily. Figured most people would be reading books commonly when there's no internet access.