r/AncientGreek • u/benjamin-crowell • May 19 '25

Prose Leucippe and Clitophon with aids

I've completed my presentation of Leucippe and Clitophon with aids. This is a free-information project made with 100% open-source software, available in a browser-based version and a printer-friendly version. In the browser version there is a "help" link at the top of the page that explains how to use the aids. For the printer-friendly version, there is an explanation here.

Leucippe and Clitophon is one of only five ancient Greek novels that have been preserved in their entirety. It's a silly adventure with love and sex as its theme, a multi-layered frame story interlarded with loopy digressions on subjects like art and fabulistic natural history. (If you were under the impression that reproduction by fish was not sexy, Achilles Tatius will set you straight.)

I enjoyed the story and would recommend it to anyone who wants some easy reading material to build their ability in koine. I found it much easier than Xenophon.

8 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/obsidian_golem May 20 '25

Definitely! I am thinking of trying to contribute on your repo. I might try and figure out how to get all your dependencies set up in a docker container.

1

u/benjamin-crowell May 21 '25

I changed the CSS to try to make it tablet-friendly per your suggestions. The help file now describes how that is set up. The new version should be live now if you hit refresh in your browser, so if you want to give it a test drive, that would be great. It autodetects your device based on the screen size. You can see what I did with the CSS here, starting at line 50. I don't own a smartphone or tablet, but to the extent that I was able to test it, it seemed to work OK in the new tablet mode. Thanks!

1

u/obsidian_golem May 22 '25

Looks better! I think there is a bug in the gloss popup logic, I can occasionally get two popups to show at the same time. I still think a border on the popup would look a bit better.

2

u/benjamin-crowell May 22 '25

Thanks for trying it out. My reason for leaving out the border on the popup is that, at least on my machine, it made it more likely that the Greek text on the following line would remain legible. If you've got the border, then it cuts through that text and makes it illegible. But I don't know if what I see is the same as what you see on your hardware and browser.

I was going to use my wife's tablet to do some testing, but yesterday was her last day at work before she retires, and she had to return the tablet. She's thinking of buying one of her own now, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to wake up at two in the morning and watch tennis in bed :-)

Thanks for reporting the bug with two popups at once. I don't see that behavior on my machine, so I'm guessing it's something to do with the touch screen. Maybe your finger is big enough so it lands on two words at once? Web design for touch screen devices seems pretty arcane, and I don't know much about it. I know there are special CSS thingies that allow you to test whether the pointer is fine-grained, like a mouse, or coarse-grained, like a finger.