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Describing the various options that are available in Beginner Text's reading settings.

Saving Your Settings

The website will remember your preferences as you move from page to page while you're in the same tab.

Depending on the browser you use, your preferences might duplicate over if you open a tab in the same window. But if you have two different tabs of Beginner Texts open, changing your reader preferences in one tab will not affect the other.

Closing the window will reset your preferences to the default settings.

Note that UCSUR preferences are saved slightly differently.

Versions

Control which language and script you would like to see.

• Sitelen Pona is the name of Toki Pona's hieroglyphic writing system.
• Sitelen Lasina is the Toki Pona name for the Latin script. The Latin alphabet has been adopted and expanded upon to suit many languages. For example, English, Croatian, Tagalog, Turkish, Swahili, and Vietnamese all can be written using slight variations of the Latin script. The words you're currently reading use the Latin script.
• English translations may be ungrammatical and uncanny at times. This is intentional in most cases. For more information, see "About my English Translations" (in-page link).

Modes

Control how different versions are presented together.

• Regular. Texts are presented without any special formatting.
• Quiz. Lose the ability to see the contextualizing picture and lose the ability to toggle English.
• Line by Line. Here you can choose to reveal the English translation for just a single sentence you are focused on, without revealing the English for the entire text. Alternatively, reveal one sentence in Sitelen Lasina (the Latin alphabet) when reading using Sitelen Pona (Toki Pona hieroglyphs).
• Table. Directly compare lines across two or all three versions in a table.

Image Settings

Show or hide the image, the image's description, and the image's attribution.

• Image Description. In addition to serving as an accessibility feature, image descriptions may draw attention to certain aspects of the image that are relevant to the story. In this way, they might provide an extra hint.
• Attribution. All images used by Beginner Texts are either part of the Public Domain, or used under Creative Commons licenses. Each attribution includes a link to the original image, the name of the creator, and a link to the specific license used.

Show SP Settings

Reveal two additional settings for Sitelen Pona (Toki Pona hieroglyphics): UCSUR Preference and SP Layout Style. This button is only visible when Sitelen Pona is active.

These additional settings will be hidden automatically if Sitelen Pona is turned off.

UCSUR Preferences

Control how Sitelen Pona (Toki Pona hieroglyphs) text is encoded.

• Use ASCII. This is the default. In ASCII-based Sitelen Pona, the font turns text like "mi moku" into Sitelen Pona. Certain browsers have issues with displaying ASCII-based Sitelen Pona.
• Use UCSUR. In UCSUR-based Sitelen Pona, text is written using special characters. For example, "mi moku" is 󱤴​󱤶. Browsers have less issues with displaying UCSUR-based Sitelen Pona. However, sometimes my converter that changes the text from ASCII to UCSUR messes up and doesn't display certain modified 'variant glyphs' properly.
• Use UCSUR on Current Page vs Use UCSUR Always. UCSUR preferences are not saved like other settings. Selecting the UCSUR setting to be "on Current Page" will not affect the next page or story that your visit. Selecting "Use UCSUR Always" will save your preference to localStorage, meaning the device will remember to use UCSUR for all your subsequent visits.

For more information, see "Broken Sitelen Pona" (in-page link), or "More about UCSUR".

SP Layout Style

Choose between two different styles of Sitelen Pona (Toki Pona hieroglphs).

• Indented makes use of line breaks and indentation to clarify the structure of Toki Pona sentences. For example, verbs pertaining to a single subject might be visually grouped together, or different sentences that fall under a single context statement might be visually grouped together. In this style, sentence-ending punctuation is not used. Instead, the ends of sentences are inferred by the grammar and the way that the sentences are indented.
• Flat collapses all line breaks and removes all indentations, and uses punctuation to indicate the end of sentences. You have a choice between what should be used as punctuation. The Interpunct looks like a vertically-centered period, ·. The CJK Final is a small unfilled circle 。︁, named as such because of its use in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Theme Selector (Light/Dark Mode)

The Theme selector is located in the website's header. Its icon is a combination of the Sitelen Pona hieroglyphs for 'sun' and 'moon' ().

• System Default. Devices with a preference for light theme will be met with Higher Contrast Light Mode. Devices with a preference for a dark theme will be met with Higher Contrast Dark Mode.
• Higher Contrast Light Mode and Dark Mode use colour combinations that meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines minimum thresholds for colour contrast.
• Lower Contrast Light Mode and Dark Mode use colour combinations that are occasionally lower than these minimum thresholds. Lower contrast modes are intended to be more suitable for reading at night-time. Some individuals might find them less overwhelming than the higher-contrast modes. Image brightness is also reduced in these modes.

Clicking anywhere else on the page will dismiss the theme selector pop up.