ez reader

accessible pdf reading, sticky notes, notes summarizer and more

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💡 Inspiration

We, as students are often required to read through PDFs. In reality, it's actually kinda tough to efficiently read through them since the white color contrast is too high, which makes eyes dizzy real quick, and there is not much flexibility as compared to a paperback. That was our inspiration to make ez reader. We wanted to make the most comfortable pdf reader with bunch of features to help out the student community around the world.

🤔 What it does

It is a pdf reader which has multiple features including:-

  • changing mode of the pdf (dark/light),
  • making sticky notes for specific pages and then accessing them later whenever the user wants,
  • summarize huge pieces of text into small notes through our ML powered library,
  • a timer to keep track of time while reading.

We've also written pytest for summarizer part which is validated by Circle CI

⚒️ How we built it

  • We used python's library flask to make our web application since its very lightweight and powerful,
  • For dark mode activation, we used css property of applying the invert filter,
  • For notes, we utilised local storage features,
  • For notes summarizer, we used pythons ML based library called spacy, and made relevant changes to it, based on our needs,
  • For timer, we used javascript to implement a countdown to it,
  • For writing test for summarizer, we used pytest, and then we validated the test on Circle CI,
  • For deploying the application, we used Heroku.

💻 Use of Circle CI

We used pytest library of python to write our test for the summarizer part. We also connected our github repository to Circle CI and after each commit, it performs the test and validates it if it's working rightly or not. So, we've used Circle CI to run tests.

🚧 Challenges we ran into

We ran into a couple of challenges while making ez reader. One major challenge was to make notes working properly because they are stored in local storage and to retrieve them and render them into multiple divs based on the number of notes was kind of tricky, but we got along with it. Moreover, it was our first time writing a pytest and validating it in Circle CI builds, so that was also a bit intriguing for us.

💞 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're very proud that we made something that could possibly bring a positive change in lives of many people, since we ourselves are gonna use it on a daily basis, we believe that other users would also enjoy the application.

📖 What we learned

We learnt a lot of things throughout the hackathon. We learnt how to apply filter on divs, use local storage to store and retrieve notes, use ML based libraries to shorten the notes and use Circle CI to carry out pytest.

📈 What's next for ez reader

We would love to make few advancements in the UI and then launch it officially. Also, for now there is no mobile version available, so we would be focusing on either making it work on mobile browsers or making an app for the same, or maybe both.

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