~~ ScrollWizard ~~

Back up and restore your library

2026-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

Everything you've built — the highlights, the words you've saved, the collections you've shaped to fit how you actually read — lives in one place. This is how you make a copy you can hold: your library, in a file you own, that no cloud has an opinion about.

ScrollWizard can write your entire reading world into a single file and read it back in. You don't need it often. But it's the kind of thing you're glad exists the day you switch phones, hand the app a fresh start, or just want a copy sitting safely in your own Files.

Where this lives

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or tap the right-edge affordance) to open the panel stack, and choose Settings. Tap Export / Import Data to open the Data Management page. Everything in this guide lives there.

Make a backup

One tap, one file.

Open Data Management (Settings → Export / Import Data).
Tap to export.
ScrollWizard writes a single file called scrollwizard_backup.json and hands it to the system share sheet.

From the share sheet you can save it to Files, AirDrop it to your Mac, drop it in a notes app, email it to yourself — wherever you keep things you don't want to lose. It's a plain, timestamped JSON document (backup schema version 1). It's yours; put it somewhere you trust.

What's inside, and what's left out

The backup is your whole reading world, not just a list of books. Here's the shape of it:

Saved in your backup	Deliberately left out
Books (your library metadata)	Your Wizard Mode purchase / entitlement
Reading positions	The developer-mode flag
Domains and folders	Your analytics-consent choice
Tags	Onboarding and hint flags
Bookmarks	OPDS catalog passwords (these live in the iOS Keychain)
Highlights and their notes
Reading-session history
App-wide and per-book reading settings
Custom themes
Dictionary sources
Smart collections
OPDS catalogs
Yearly reading goals
Import / download history
Your saved vocabulary
Your RSVP session history

The things left out are device-local on purpose. Your purchase, your privacy choice, and your setup flags belong to this install — they shouldn't ride along into a file you might edit by hand or move between devices. That's a deliberate boundary, and a quietly reassuring one: a hand-edited backup can't unlock a paid feature or flip your privacy settings. The backup carries your reading, not your permissions.

OPDS catalog passwords sit in the same protected place — the iOS Keychain — so they're never written into the file. After a restore, you simply re-enter them once and you're set.

The one thing that only lives in your backup

Here's the part worth reading slowly, because it's the whole reason this feature matters.

Almost everything in that table also travels through iCloud. Your books, positions, highlights, settings, collections — and the words you've saved — sync quietly in the background, so they already survive a reinstall on their own. You usually don't have to think about them.

One thing is different. It doesn't sync, and it has no iCloud copy:

Your RSVP session history — your speed-reading record.

For that, a JSON backup is the only copy that exists. If you Delete All Data, or reinstall the app without restoring from a backup first, any RSVP history you haven't exported is gone for good — there's no cloud copy waiting to bring it back.

That's not a flaw to worry over; it's just the one place where the convenient automatic safety net doesn't reach. And the fix is the same simple file you already know how to make. Export a backup before any big change, and your speed-reading history is as safe as everything else.

Bring a backup back

Restoring is just as direct as making one.

On the Data Management page, tap Import Data (JSON).
Pick your .json file.
ScrollWizard validates it and asks how you'd like to bring it in.

You get two ways:

Merge — adds the backup's records to what you already have. Where something matches, the imported copy wins; nothing you currently have is removed. This is the gentle, additive choice.
Wipe & Replace — clears your current data first, then imports the backup. (The device-local settings above — your purchase, privacy choice, and flags — always survive, even a Replace.)

A couple of things worth knowing so nothing surprises you:

A backup made by a newer version of ScrollWizard than the one you're running is politely refused — just update the app first, then import.
Older backups import fine. Anything a newer app added that an old backup doesn't contain is simply skipped, never broken.

Before you wipe or reinstall

If you ever head to Data Management → Danger Zone → Delete All Data, that's a real reset. It returns the app to a freshly-installed state: it clears the local database, the iCloud copy (best-effort), your saved credentials, logs, and caches. It sits behind two confirmation dialogs, so you can't trip into it.

There's nothing scary about having a clean-slate button — it's genuinely useful. The only thing to do first is the easy one:

Export a backup before you Delete All Data, reinstall, or move to a new device. It takes one tap, and it's the only thing that protects your RSVP session history. With a backup in hand, a wipe is just a tidy fresh start instead of a loss.

You may also spot an Export Annotations action. It's a different tool: it produces a clean, human-readable Markdown file of all your highlights and bookmarks — lovely for archiving or sharing, but it is not a backup and can't be imported back into the app. If that's what you're after, the Annotations & Highlights guide and the Export guide cover it properly.

That's the whole feature: one file, two ways to bring it back, and one small habit — export before you wipe — that keeps everything you've built genuinely yours. Make the copy, put it somewhere you trust, and read without keeping one eye on the exits.

Happy reading.

Keyboard shortcuts

2026-06-06T00:00:00+02:00

You're a few hundred pages into a book, keyboard attached, and reaching up to tap the screen every time you turn a page starts to feel like rolling down a car window by hand. You don't have to. ScrollWizard speaks fluent keyboard.

These shortcuts are built in and ready to go on iPad with a Magic Keyboard (or any Bluetooth/USB keyboard) and on Mac. One honest note up front: they only do anything when a hardware keyboard is attached. On a touch-only iPhone, there's nothing here for you — which is fine, that's what the on-screen controls are for.

Reader

These work any time you're reading a book. Most are plain single keys — no modifier required — so they're quick to reach for.

Action	Keys
Next page	`→` , `Space` , `Page Down`
Previous page	`←` , `Page Up`
Show / hide the menu (toolbar)	`Esc`
Add / remove a bookmark here	`B`
Table of contents	`T`
Search inside the book (PDF only)	`F`
Toggle Split Reader	`⌘⇧S`

Split Reader

These only do something when split view is active. Don't have it open yet? ⌘⇧S from a book gets you there.

Action	Keys
Next page (active pane)	`→` , `↓` , `Space` , `Page Down`
Previous page (active pane)	`←` , `↑` , `Page Up`
Switch the active pane	`Tab`
Set ratio 67 / 33	`⌘[`
Set ratio 33 / 67	`⌘]`
Set ratio 50 / 50	`⌘\`
Swap the two panes	`⌘⇧X`
Close the split	`⌘W` , `⌘⇧S`

Tips

→ and Space both turn the page, so use whichever your hand is already near. ← walks you back.
B and T are single taps, no ⌘ needed — drop a bookmark or jump to the contents without breaking stride.
In split view, Tab decides who listens. The pane you switch to is the one that turns pages and takes your next shortcut.

What's next

Two books at once, or two spots in the same one — the Split Reader Guide covers the whole flow.
Bookmarks, highlights, and notes live in the Annotations & Highlights Guide.

Happy reading.

Save Words & Look Them Up in a Built-In Dictionary

2026-05-27T00:00:00+02:00

You know that moment — you hit a word you don't quite know, and you have to choose: break your reading flow to look it up, or keep going and hope it sticks. It never sticks.

ScrollWizard's dictionary fixes the lookup part without ever leaving the page. The words worth keeping go into a personal list — with the sentence, the book, the moment — and the whole list exports when you want to take it with you.

Here for the custom-dictionary JSON format? Skip straight to Custom Dictionaries.

Looking Up a Word

Get the definition right there, right then — no app-switching, no lost place, no broken thread of thought.

Long-press on a word in the reader, then adjust the selection handles if needed.
The context menu appears with options including Define.
Tap Define. A popup appears showing definitions from multiple sources at once.

This works the same in EPUB and PDF books: select the text, tap Define, and the popup queries all your enabled sources in parallel. The bundled offline Webster's 1913 and any local dictionaries are instant; the online Free Dictionary API takes a moment depending on your connection. The whole thing takes about three seconds.

Word in large bold text
Phonetic pronunciation in italics (when available)
Definitions grouped by source, each with a source label
Part of speech badges (noun, verb, adjective) in accent color
Up to three definitions per part of speech — enough to understand, not enough to overwhelm
Example sentences in context
Web dictionary buttons at the bottom (Wiktionary, Merriam-Webster, Oxford) for deeper dives

If a word has definitions from multiple sources, they all appear in the same popup. The Free Dictionary API gives you a concise modern definition; Webster's 1913 gives you an etymologically rich one. Having both means you get practical clarity and historical depth.

Dismiss the popup by tapping the X button, tapping outside it, or swiping down. You're back to reading instantly. Your position in the book hasn't changed.

Saving Words

One tap turns a fleeting lookup into a word you'll actually keep.

At the bottom of the dictionary popup, tap Add to saved words. That's it. This works while you're reading an EPUB or a PDF — a word saved from a PDF is stamped with the page you found it on. Each saved word stores:

The word itself
The definition shown in the popup
Part of speech and phonetic pronunciation
An example sentence from the dictionary
The book title and reference (plus the page for PDFs)
The context — the actual sentence from your book where you found the word

That last one matters. Six months from now, "ameliorate" with a textbook definition is forgettable. "Ameliorate" with the exact sentence from chapter seven of a novel you loved — that sticks. ScrollWizard captures the real context automatically because a word remembered in context is a word remembered for good.

If you've already saved a word, the button shows "Saved" and is disabled. No accidental duplicates — the check is case-insensitive across your entire vocabulary, regardless of which book you're reading.

Browsing Your Saved Words

Every word you've saved, organized and waiting — your personal record of curiosity.

Your saved words live in the Notes panel. Swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or tap the right-edge affordance) to open the panel stack, land on Notes, and you'll see a Words section with your most recent saves. Tap See all to open the full Words view — every word you've kept, with a count at the top.

Each word appears as a card: the word in bold, phonetic pronunciation, part of speech badge, a two-line definition preview, the book it came from, and the date added. Tap any card to see the full definition, example sentence, and the original context from your book. Tap again to open the book at the place you found the word, if the book is still in your library.

Sort by newest, oldest, A—Z, or Z—A from the chip at the top of the list. Swipe a card to archive it; archived words move to a Recently Removed bin that auto-clears after 30 days, so a wrong swipe is recoverable.

Ten words you actually know are worth more than two hundred you crammed. Don't worry if your list feels small — every word on it came from real reading, attached to a real sentence, in a real book. That's a vocabulary list with roots.

Exporting Your Saved Words

Your saved words are yours — take them wherever you want them.

Tap the share button at the top of the Words view (or use Export vocabulary in the Notes panel) and choose a format:

Anki CSV (.txt)

Tab-separated, formatted for direct Anki import. Front: word with phonetic. Back: HTML-formatted definition with part of speech, example, and context. Tags: book::BookTitle for automatic per-book tag grouping in Anki. Import with "Fields separated by: Tab" and "Allow HTML in fields" checked.

TSV (.tsv)

Tab-separated with a header row. Open in any spreadsheet to filter, sort, or build your own study setup.

JSON (.json)

Complete export of every field. Best for backups, scripts, or any tool that reads JSON.

All formats use the system share sheet — save to Files, AirDrop to your Mac, or send to another app.

Dictionary Settings

Dial in which dictionaries show up so lookups give you what you actually need.

Open Settings > Dictionary. Sources are grouped by type:

Group	Sources
Inline API	Free Dictionary API
Local Dictionaries	Webster's 1913, plus any you've imported
Web Dictionaries	Wiktionary, Merriam-Webster, Oxford, plus custom

Each source has an enable/disable toggle and a type badge. Disable what you don't use — if you never tap the web dictionary buttons, turn them off to declutter the popup. If you want offline-only definitions, disable the API and rely on Webster's 1913 and local dictionaries.

Webster's 1913 is worth keeping enabled. Even alongside the modern API, its literary definitions add depth. Seeing both a concise modern definition and a 19th-century etymological essay for the same word often deepens understanding more than either alone.

Custom Dictionaries

If the built-in options don't cover your language or field, bring your own.

Local JSON Dictionaries

Place dictionary files in your iCloud Drive > ScrollWizard > Dictionaries folder, then import them from Settings > Dictionary > Import from iCloud.

Every file needs a top-level name and an entries object — a bare {"word": "definition"} map won't load. Inside entries, each word can use either of two shapes:

Simple — one definition per word:

{
  "name": "My Glossary",
  "entries": {
    "ephemeral": "lasting for a very short time",
    "ubiquitous": "present, appearing, or found everywhere"
  }
}

Full — with phonetics and structured definitions:

{
  "name": "My Glossary",
  "entries": {
    "ephemeral": {
      "phonetic": "/ɪˈfɛm.ər.əl/",
      "definitions": [
        {
          "partOfSpeech": "adjective",
          "definition": "lasting for a very short time"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Local dictionaries work offline and can be in any language. This is especially useful for language learners maintaining bilingual glossaries, specialized fields (medical, legal, technical), or even custom glossaries for a fantasy series you're reading.

Local dictionaries are cached in memory after first load. If you edit the file on your Mac and sync via iCloud, restart ScrollWizard to pick up changes.

Custom Web Dictionaries

Add web dictionaries with a URL template containing a {word} placeholder:

Settings > Dictionary > Add Web Dictionary.
Enter a name (e.g., "Jisho Japanese") and a URL template (e.g., https://jisho.org/search/{word}).
Save. The new source appears as a button in the dictionary popup.

The Test button opens the URL with "serendipity" as a test word so you can verify it works before saving.

Tips & Tricks

Small habits that turn casual reading into a vocabulary list with actual reach.

Save generously. You can always archive later. You can't retroactively save a word you looked up three chapters ago. When in doubt, tap save.

Let the context do the work. ScrollWizard captures the sentence you found the word in. That sentence — your sentence, from the book you were actually reading — is what makes the word memorable later. Don't rewrite it. Don't summarise it. Leave it.

The API is English-only; custom dictionaries are not. The Free Dictionary API handles English. For other languages, add local JSON dictionaries or custom web dictionaries pointed at language-specific resources (Jisho, WordReference, Dict.cc).

Pair with the Split Reader. If you're reading in a second language, try opening the original in one pane and a translation in the other. Look up unfamiliar words, save them, glance at the translation for confirmation. See the Split Reader Guide for setup.

Export on your schedule. Take the list with you when you want to — not every session, not on a schedule. Each export is a snapshot; the next one picks up everything new.

What's Next

Your reading is already building your vocabulary — ScrollWizard just makes sure you keep what you find.

Highlighting and annotating? The Annotations & Highlights Guide covers colors, notes, bookmarks, and export — highlights and word lookups share the same text selection menu and work beautifully side by side.
Moving knowledge into your workflow? The Export Guide covers Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, and more.
New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers the basics.

Happy reading.

FAQ

2026-05-25T00:00:00+02:00

A small list, growing as questions come in.

Does ScrollWizard scroll?

No. ScrollWizard is a paginated reader.

Is it free?

Yes. Reading EPUBs and PDFs, themes, the dictionary, highlights and notes, stats, OPDS catalogs, and iCloud sync are all free. Advanced Wizard Mode is a one-time purchase — no subscription.

What does Advanced Wizard Mode add?

The RSVP Speed Reader, the Split Reader, and Custom Fonts. Everything else is free.

What file formats can I read?

EPUB and PDF. For anything else — MOBI, AZW3, CBZ — convert it to EPUB or PDF in Calibre first, then import.

Does it work offline?

Yes. A bundled offline Webster's 1913 dictionary means tap-to-define works with no internet. (An online dictionary is also available when you are connected.)

Where do my books live?

In a folder you own in iCloud Drive. Your books are files — not locked inside the app.

Can I export my highlights and notes?

Yes. Knowledge Export sends them to Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Markdown, or JSON.

Library Management

2026-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

Five books need no system. Fifty books need a good one. Five hundred books need a system that mostly runs itself.

If your library has grown past the point where you can eyeball the grid and find what you want, this guide is for you. ScrollWizard gives you three organizational layers — domains, tags, and smart collections — plus search, sort, and filter tools that make any library navigable in seconds. Everything here is free. No premium organization tier.

The Getting Started Guide covers the basics of importing books and navigating the library. This guide goes deeper: the full toolkit for readers with growing libraries.

Your Library at a Glance

Your library opens to a grid of covers — two columns on iPhone, more on iPad. Covers out, scannable at a glance, the way a bookshelf looks. Everything that reshapes that grid — sorting, domains, tags, smart collections — lives in the left sidebar: swipe in from the left edge, or tap the three-line menu icon in the top-left. There's no filter bar across the top; the sidebar is the one place organization happens.

The + button in the top-right opens the file picker directly, so importing a book is one tap away. (OPDS catalogs are a different doorway — the Catalog panel on the right edge, covered later.)

Sorting

Sort lives in the sidebar, near the top. The sort control shows your current sort option and direction (arrow up or arrow down).

Sort Option	Default Direction	What it does
Title	A to Z	Alphabetical by book title
Author	A to Z	Alphabetical by author name
Date Added	Newest first	When you imported the book
Last Read	Most recent first	When you last opened the book
Progress	Highest first	Your reading progress percentage

Tap the sort control to open the sort menu. Selecting the same option again toggles the direction — so tapping "Title" once sorts A to Z, tapping it again sorts Z to A.

Tip: "Last Read" (most recent first) is the default, and it's a solid choice for most libraries. The book you touched last sits at the top, ready to reopen, and books you haven't picked up in a while settle toward the bottom.

Domains

Domains are the broadest organizational layer. Think of them as rooms in a library — or shelves on a wall. Each book belongs to at most one domain.

Some people never create a domain. That's fine. But if your library spans fiction and textbooks and work documents and personal projects, domains let you separate those worlds cleanly.

Creating a Domain

Open the library sidebar (tap the three-line menu icon in the top-left).
Under the Domains section, tap the + button.
Name your domain (e.g., "Fiction," "Work," "Study," "Research").
Done. Your domain appears in the sidebar.

Color-Coding

Each domain can have a color. Long-press a domain in the sidebar, then choose "Change Color" to pick from eight options: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, magenta, or no color. The color appears as a dot next to the domain name in the sidebar — a quick visual cue when you're scanning.

Filtering by Domain

Tap a domain in the sidebar to show only books in that domain. Tap "All" to see everything again. There's also an "Unsorted" row that shows books without any domain assigned.

Assigning Books to Domains

There are three ways:

From the book detail sheet. Long-press a book, then tap the domain selector to choose or change its domain.
In selection mode. Tap the checkmark icon to enter selection mode, select the books you want, then tap the Domain button in the batch action bar at the bottom.
From the batch action bar. After selecting books, tap Domain, then choose the target domain. All selected books move at once.

Managing Domains

Long-press any domain in the sidebar to rename it, change its color, or delete it. Deleting a domain doesn't delete its books — they simply become "Unsorted."

You can also manage domains from a dedicated screen: sidebar > Domains > Manage (or via Settings). The management screen lets you swipe left to delete or swipe right to rename.

How Many Domains?

Two to five is the sweet spot. Domains work best as broad categories — Fiction / Non-Fiction, Work / Personal, English / Other Languages. If you find yourself creating ten domains, you probably want tags instead.

Smart Collections

Smart collections are dynamic groups that update themselves based on rules. You don't add books to a smart collection — books appear (and disappear) automatically as they match the criteria.

Built-in Presets

Five smart collections come ready to use:

Collection	Rule
Currently Reading	Progress greater than 0% and less than 100%
Unread	Progress equals 0%
Finished	Progress at least 100%
Recently Added	Added within the last 30 days
Recently Read	Read within the last 7 days

These appear as rows in the sidebar. Tap one to filter your library. Tap it again to clear the filter.

Creating Custom Smart Collections

Open the sidebar, scroll to Smart Collections, and tap the manage button (the slider icon). In the Smart Collections sheet, tap Create New.

The rule editor lets you build collections from any combination of:

Field	Available Operators
Title	contains, doesn't contain, equals, not equals, is empty, is not empty
Author	contains, doesn't contain, equals, not equals, is empty, is not empty
Language	contains, doesn't contain, equals, not equals, is empty, is not empty
Tags	is any of, are all of, is none of, is empty, is not empty
Domain	contains, doesn't contain, equals, not equals, is empty, is not empty
Progress	equals, not equals, greater than, less than, at least, at most
Date Added	within last N days, is empty, is not empty
Last Read	within last N days, is empty, is not empty

The Tags operators work on whole tags, not text fragments: pick one or more tags from a multi-select picker, and "is any of" matches a book with at least one of them, "are all of" matches only books carrying every one, and "is none of" excludes them. "is empty" / "is not empty" match books with no tags / any tags.

Each collection can have multiple rules, and you choose whether books must match all rules (AND) or any rule (OR).

Examples:

"French Literature" — Language contains "fr" AND Tags is any of "literature, classics"
"Active reads" — Progress greater than 0.1 AND Last Read within 30 days
"Deep Work" — Tags are all of "non-fiction, reference" AND Progress greater than 0

Custom smart collections are persisted and sync with iCloud. Built-in presets can't be deleted.

Search

ScrollWizard offers two layers of search:

Library Search (Title and Author)

The search bar in the library (tap the magnifying glass icon in the nav bar) filters by title and author in real time as you type. Fast, simple, good enough when you know roughly what you're looking for.

When you have a domain filter active, search defaults to searching within that domain. A small "All" toggle appears next to the search field — tap it to search across your entire library regardless of the active domain.

Full-Text Search (Inside Books)

ScrollWizard indexes the full text of every book using SQLite FTS5 — a fast, local full-text search engine. This means you can search for a phrase you half-remember and find it across your entire library.

Full-text search is available from the reader's toolbar (tap the search icon while reading). Results show highlighted snippets with the matching text, grouped by chapter. Tap any result to jump directly to that passage.

Both EPUBs and PDFs are indexed — EPUBs by chapter, PDFs by page.

Selection Mode and Batch Operations

When you need to organize more than one book at a time, selection mode is the way.

Entering Selection Mode

Tap the checkmark icon in the library nav bar. The view shifts: book covers gain selection checkmarks, and a batch action bar appears at the bottom.

Selecting Books

Tap any book to toggle its selection.
Tap "Select All" in the nav bar to select everything visible (respects current filters).
In grid view, long-press and drag across multiple books to select a range.

Batch Actions

The action bar at the bottom offers three operations:

Action	What it does
Tag	Opens the batch tag sheet to add/remove tags from all selected books
Domain	Opens a domain picker to move all selected books to a domain (or remove domain)
Delete	Removes all selected books from the library (with confirmation)

Exiting Selection Mode

Tap Cancel in the nav bar, or deselect all books.

The Book Detail Sheet

Long-press any book to open its detail sheet — a scrollable card with everything ScrollWizard knows about that book.

What you'll find:

Cover image, title, and author at the top
Metadata card: file size, chapter count, language, date added, last read, and iCloud storage status
Reading progress: a visual progress bar with percentage and current chapter
Description: the book's synopsis (from EPUB/PDF metadata)
Tags section: add, remove, and search tags; see existing library tags as suggestions
Domain selector: change or remove the book's domain
Action buttons: Continue Reading (or Start Reading), Look Up on Goodreads, Show in Files, Remove from Library

The detail sheet is live — changes you make to tags and domain update immediately without closing the sheet.

Import and Duplicate Detection

When you import books, ScrollWizard automatically checks for duplicates. If a file matches an existing book by title and author, the duplicate is silently skipped. This means you can safely re-import a folder without worrying about creating duplicates.

Import supports EPUB and PDF files up to 500 MB. You can select multiple files at once for batch import, and a progress dialog tracks each file as it's parsed, indexed, and added to the library.

Books imported via the share sheet, AirDrop, or the Files app are handled automatically — they appear in your library without any extra steps.

The library sidebar (swipe right from the left edge, or tap the menu icon) is your central navigation hub. From top to bottom:

Domains — with book counts and a + button to create new ones
Smart Collections — built-in presets and your custom collections, each with book counts
Tags — every tag in your library with book counts, plus a search field and long-press context menus
More — quick links to Settings, Statistics, Annotation Timeline, Vocabulary, and Knowledge Export

The sidebar shows real-time counts: how many books are in each domain, how many match each smart collection, how many carry each tag. These update instantly as you add, remove, or tag books.

Organization Strategies

Here's the honest truth about library organization: the best system is the one you'll actually maintain. A perfect taxonomy that you abandon after three weeks is worse than a loose system you use every day.

The Minimalist

No domains. No tags. Sort by "Last Read" and let smart collections do the work — Currently Reading and Recently Added are always there. Works surprisingly well for libraries under 100 books.

The Two-Domain Split

One meaningful division: Fiction / Non-Fiction, or Personal / Work. Smart collections handle the rest. Low maintenance, high signal.

The Tagger

Skip domains. Use tags for everything. Tags are more flexible — one book can carry five tags, but it can only live in one domain. If your categories overlap (sci-fi and book-club and re-read candidate), tags are your tool.

The Curator

Domains for broad categories, tags for cross-cutting themes, custom smart collections for current projects. Most work to set up, but scales to very large libraries. Start simple — you can add structure later.

The One Rule

Whatever you choose: organize when you import, not later. Assigning a domain and a couple of tags takes five seconds at import time. Retroactively organizing 200 untagged books takes an afternoon. The batch tag tool makes it painless, but "five seconds now" beats "an hour someday."

Tips & Tricks

Your filters persist between sessions. Close the app mid-browse in your "Fiction" domain, and you'll come back to exactly that. Sort order and domain selection stay put too.

The Continue Reading card. A card appears at the top of your library showing your last-read book with its progress. One tap to pick up where you left off. It disappears in selection mode to keep the interface clean.

Drag to select a range. Long-press and drag across book covers to select several at once — faster than tapping each one individually.

Search across domains. When a domain filter is active and you open search, an "All" toggle appears beside the search field. Tap it to search your entire library, not just the current domain.

Tag AND/OR logic. When filtering by multiple tags in the sidebar, look for the AND/OR toggle. AND shows books matching all tags; OR shows books matching any tag. Default is AND.

Spotlight indexing. Every book you import is indexed in iOS Spotlight. You can search for a book title from the iOS home screen and jump straight into it.

Books per domain, at a glance. The sidebar shows book counts next to every domain, smart collection, and tag. No need to switch views to see how many books live where.

Goodreads lookup. From the book detail sheet, tap "Look Up on Goodreads" to search for the book on Goodreads in Safari. Useful for checking reviews or adding to your Goodreads shelf.

Show in Files. Also in the detail sheet: "Show in Files" opens the book's location in the iOS Files app. Handy when you need to share the file or verify its iCloud sync status.

Fill the shelf from a catalog. Swipe in from the right edge to the Catalog panel to browse OPDS and Calibre libraries. ScrollWizard ships four presets (Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks, ManyBooks, Feedbooks) and can also sniff out OPDS and Calibre servers on your local network automatically over Bonjour, so a Calibre box on your Wi-Fi often just shows up. You can add a server by hand from its OPDS URL. Downloads come through as EPUB or PDF (EPUB is preferred when a title offers both).

What's Next

A well-organized library isn't about neatness for its own sake. It's about reducing the friction between "I want to read something" and actually reading it. Fifteen seconds of scrolling through an unsorted grid is fifteen seconds you could have spent reading.

Tracking your progress? The Track Your Reading Guide covers reading time, goals, and statistics.
Highlighting as you read? The Annotations & Highlights Guide covers your five highlight colors, notes, bookmarks, and the annotation timeline.
Exporting your knowledge? The Export Guide covers Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Markdown, and JSON export.
New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers importing books, reading basics, and everything else.

Now go find that book you've been meaning to start. It's in your library somewhere — and now you know exactly how to find it.

Happy reading.

Reading PDFs on iPhone & iPad

2026-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

That conference paper. That textbook chapter. That government form you've been avoiding. ScrollWizard reads PDFs alongside your EPUBs — same library, same themes, same highlights. One app for all your reading.

PDFs are everywhere. Research papers, manuals, scanned books, slide decks, tax forms. They weren't designed for phone screens, but that's where you are at 11 PM when you finally have time to read. ScrollWizard's PDF reader gives you theme-matched reading, full-text search, highlights with notes, bookmarks, dictionary lookup, and saved words. It's all free — the one exception is the RSVP speed reader, which is part of Advanced Wizard Mode.

This guide covers everything the PDF reader can do — and is honest about what it can't.

Importing PDFs

Getting a PDF into ScrollWizard works exactly like importing an EPUB. If you've done one, you've done the other.

From the Library

Open ScrollWizard and go to the Library screen.
Tap the + button in the top-right corner.
The iOS file picker appears. Navigate to your PDF — it can be in iCloud Drive, On My iPhone, or any connected cloud storage.
Select the file. ScrollWizard imports it, generates a cover thumbnail from the first page, and extracts the title and author from the PDF metadata.
Your PDF appears in the library alongside your EPUBs.

You can select multiple files at once for batch import. PDFs and EPUBs can be mixed in the same batch.

From Other Apps

Share sheet: When viewing a PDF in Safari, Mail, Files, or any other app, tap the share button and choose "Open in ScrollWizard."
AirDrop: AirDrop a PDF to your device and choose ScrollWizard when prompted.
Messages and Mail: Tap a PDF attachment, then use the share sheet.

Once imported, the PDF lives in your ScrollWizard library. It syncs via iCloud to your other devices, gets organized into domains and collections, appears in search results, and tracks reading statistics — just like an EPUB.

The PDF Reading Experience

Open a PDF from your library by tapping its cover. The reader launches with a familiar layout: your book fills the screen, and a tap in the center reveals the toolbar.

Here's the key difference between PDFs and EPUBs: PDFs have fixed layouts. Every page is a snapshot — the text, images, and formatting are locked in place exactly as the author intended. This means ScrollWizard can't reflow the text to fit your screen, change the font, or adjust the line spacing. What the PDF contains is what you see.

This is not a limitation of ScrollWizard. It's what PDF means. The format was designed to look identical everywhere — on a printer, a desktop monitor, or your phone. That's useful when layout matters (academic papers, forms, sheet music), but it means the reading experience on a phone screen depends on how the PDF was designed.

ScrollWizard compensates with pinch-to-zoom and theme-aware color filtering, both covered below.

Pinch to Zoom

A PDF designed for A4 paper carries generous margins, headers, and footers, so on a phone screen the actual text can be small. Pinch to zoom in and out on any page, and double-tap to reset the zoom level. Turning the phone sideways (see the tips below) gives a dense page more horizontal room. It's the most basic way to make small text readable, and it works on every PDF.

Theme-Aware Color Filtering

When you switch reading themes, ScrollWizard doesn't just darken the UI chrome — it reskins the PDF content into the active theme's palette. It does this with a single luminance remap: each pixel is mapped along the line between the theme's text color and its background color, so a white page picks up the theme background and the dark text picks up the theme text color. Figures stay coherent with the page instead of getting hue-rotated the way a naive inversion would.

This means your midnight reading session doesn't blast you with a white rectangle in the middle of a dark interface. The PDF adapts to your theme.

Theme type	What happens to PDF pages
Light	Passed through as-is (white page, near-black text)
Any other theme	Pages are remapped into that theme's palette (background and text colors) via the luminance remap

The same remap drives every built-in and custom theme, so a Sepia page reads as the Sepia palette and a Nord page reads as the Nord palette — one mechanism, no per-theme special cases. Theme creation and the broader appearance controls live in Settings and Customization.

Brightness Control

The bottom bar includes a brightness slider, just like the EPUB reader. Drag it to dim or brighten the screen without leaving your book.

Navigating PDFs

Page Slider

When the toolbar is visible, a progress slider appears at the bottom. Drag it to scrub through the document, or tap the page numbers on either side. The slider shows your current page and total page count.

If the PDF includes an outline (most well-made PDFs do), a table of contents button appears in the toolbar. Tap it to open a bottom sheet showing the full document outline with nested sections, page numbers, and a highlight on your current section.

Tap any entry to jump to that page. The sheet auto-scrolls to your current position when it opens.

Not all PDFs have outlines. Scanned books, simple exports, and some older PDFs won't have one, and the TOC button will be hidden.

Tap Zones

The same tap zone system from the EPUB reader applies to PDFs:

Right side — next page
Left side — previous page
Center — toggle toolbar

Tap zones are configurable in Settings. You can also swipe left/right to turn pages.

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you're reading on an iPad with a hardware keyboard, the PDF reader supports the same keyboard shortcuts as the EPUB reader: arrow keys for page turns, B for bookmark, and more. Press F to open search.

Reading Chrome

Even with the toolbar hidden, subtle metadata appears in the safe area around the notch or Dynamic Island: the current time, page number, reading progress percentage, and the current section title (resolved from the PDF outline). This uses no extra screen space.

Highlights and Annotations

PDF highlighting in ScrollWizard works with native text — the kind you can select and copy. Here's the flow.

Creating a Highlight

Long-press on a word in the PDF, then drag the selection handles to cover the passage you want.
A context menu appears with Copy, Highlight, and five color dots for one-tap color selection.
Tap a color dot or tap Highlight (which defaults to yellow).
The text is highlighted and saved immediately.

The context menu for PDFs shows the color dots directly, so you can pick your color in a single tap without opening the edit sheet first.

Editing a Highlight

Tap an existing highlight to open the highlight edit sheet. From here you can:

Change the color — tap any of the five color circles
Switch the style — toggle between Highlight (background fill) and Underline (a line beneath the text)
Add or edit a note — type in the text field below the preview
Delete the highlight — tap the red Delete button at the bottom

Notes auto-save as you type. No save button needed.

Browsing Highlights

Open the table of contents sheet from the toolbar and switch to its Highlights tab to see all highlights for the current PDF, sorted by page number. Each row shows the color bar, highlighted text, any note, and the page reference. Tap a row to jump to that page.

Bookmarks

Tap the bookmark icon in the toolbar to bookmark the current page. The icon fills in to confirm. Tap it again to remove the bookmark.

To browse all bookmarks, open the same table of contents sheet and switch to its Bookmarks tab. The sheet has three tabs in all — Contents, Bookmarks, and Highlights — so document outline, saved pages, and annotations all live in one place. The list shows each bookmark with its page number.

All annotation features — highlights, notes, bookmarks — are free. No limits.

To get your highlights and notes out of the app, use Knowledge Export (Notes panel ▸ Export ▸ Export knowledge), which writes a library-wide Markdown file you share through the iOS share sheet. There's no separate export action inside the PDF reader itself.

A Note About Scanned PDFs

Highlighting requires selectable text. If your PDF is a scan (essentially a stack of images), there's no text to select or highlight. ScrollWizard detects this automatically when you import the file. You can still bookmark pages and scrub with the page slider, but text selection, highlighting, and search won't be available.

ScrollWizard classifies each PDF on import:

Text quality	What it means
Native text	Full text in the PDF. All features work.
Hybrid	Some pages have text, others are scanned. Features work on text pages.
Scanned	No extractable text. Bookmarks and navigation only.

Searching PDFs

Tap the search icon in the toolbar (or press F on a hardware keyboard) to open the search bar. Type your query and ScrollWizard searches the PDF text in real time.

The search bar shows your current match position ("3 of 17") with up/down arrows to jump between matches. Matches are highlighted in the document.

Search works on PDFs with native or hybrid text. Scanned PDFs have no text to search.

RSVP Speed Reading for PDFs

The RSVP speed reader — the word-at-a-time display from Advanced Wizard Mode — also works with PDFs that contain native text. Tap the sparkle button in the toolbar to access it.

ScrollWizard extracts all the text from the PDF, cleans it up (stripping repeated headers and footers, rejoining hyphenated words), and feeds it into the RSVP engine. When you exit the speed reader, your page position updates to match where you stopped.

A note of honesty: RSVP with PDFs works well for text-heavy documents like papers and books. It works less well for PDFs with complex layouts, tables, or figures, because the extracted text may not flow naturally. ScrollWizard shows a one-time heads-up about this when you first use it.

RSVP requires Advanced Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase) and a PDF with native text.

PDF vs. EPUB: What Works Where

This is the honest comparison. Both formats live in the same library, but they have fundamentally different strengths.

Feature	EPUB	PDF
Reflow text to fit screen	Yes	No — fixed layout
Change font	Yes (12 selectable + Publisher)	No
Adjust font size	Yes	No (pinch to zoom)
Change line height / spacing	Yes	No
Adjust margins	Yes	No
Reading themes (dark, sepia, etc.)	Yes	Yes (via color filtering)
Brightness control	Yes	Yes
Highlights with notes	Yes	Yes (native text PDFs)
Bookmarks	Yes	Yes
Text search	Yes	Yes (native text PDFs)
Table of Contents	Yes	Yes (if PDF has outline)
RSVP speed reading	Yes	Yes (native text PDFs)
Dictionary lookup	Yes	Yes (native text PDFs)
Vocabulary builder	Yes	Yes (saved with a page stamp)
Split Reader	Yes	No (EPUB-only)
Page turn animations	Yes	No
iCloud sync	Yes	Yes
Reading statistics	Yes	Yes
Knowledge Export (highlights & notes)	Yes	Yes (library-wide, via Notes panel)
Keyboard shortcuts	Yes	Yes

The rule of thumb: If you have a choice between EPUB and PDF versions of the same book, choose EPUB. You'll get reflowable text, custom fonts, adjustable typography, and the Split Reader. The reading experience is simply more flexible. (Dictionary lookup and saved words work in both — on a PDF they just need native, selectable text.)

Choose PDF when that's the only format available, or when the fixed layout matters — academic papers, technical manuals, sheet music, forms, and anything with precise visual formatting.

Tips for the Best PDF Reading Experience

Use dark theme for nighttime PDF reading. The luminance remap reskins white pages into the dark palette without crushing text legibility, so a midnight session isn't a white rectangle in a dark room.

Try landscape on iPhone. Turning your phone sideways gives PDFs significantly more horizontal space — a real help on a dense page.

Bookmark generously. Since PDFs don't have reflowable chapters, bookmarks are your best tool for marking positions you want to return to. They're free, fast, and show up in the bookmarks list sorted by page number.

Check text quality on import. When ScrollWizard imports a PDF, it classifies the text quality. If your PDF shows up as "scanned," features like search and highlighting won't work. This isn't a bug — the PDF simply doesn't contain extractable text. For scanned books, consider finding an EPUB version or a PDF that's been OCR-processed.

What's Next

PDFs aren't the most comfortable format for phone-sized screens — that's just the reality of a fixed-layout format on a small display. But ScrollWizard does its best to close the gap: theme-aware rendering, highlights, search, and iCloud sync make PDFs feel like first-class citizens in your library rather than a grudging afterthought.

Everything in this guide is free except RSVP speed reading, which is part of Advanced Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase).

New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers importing, reading basics, and library organization.
Want to annotate more effectively? The Annotations & Highlights Guide goes deep on colors, notes, export, and the annotation timeline.
Interested in speed reading? The RSVP Speed Reader Guide covers the word-at-a-time display for both EPUBs and PDFs.
Tracking your reading habits? The Reading Statistics Guide covers sessions, days-read, and goals.

Happy reading — even the PDFs.

Settings & Customization

2026-04-09T00:00:00+02:00

You've been staring at a page that's almost right. The font is fine, but the line spacing feels a little cramped. The theme is close, but you wish the background were warmer. The margins are OK on your phone, but on your iPad they leave the text swimming in white space.

This is the guide where you fix all of that. ScrollWizard gives you deep control over how your books look and feel — typography, themes, layout, tap behavior, reading goals, dictionaries, and more. Every setting updates live, so you can see the result as you tweak. And every visual setting can be applied globally or per book, meaning your dense philosophy text and your beach novel don't have to look the same.

Let's walk through everything.

Two Places, One System

Settings in ScrollWizard live in two places, and it helps to understand why.

The Appearance Sheet (Visual Settings)

Open any book, tap the center of the screen to show the toolbar, then tap the Aa button (or "More Settings" in the quick panel). This is the Appearance Sheet — a draggable overlay that stays on top of your book so you can see changes in real time.

The Appearance Sheet contains:

Typography — font, size, line height, spacing, alignment, hyphenation
Layout — margins, page animation
Theme — color scheme selection, custom theme creation, and color swap
Display — hide status bar

You can drag the sheet up or down to resize it, or tap the arrow icon to flip it to the top of the screen if you want to see the bottom of the page while adjusting.

The Settings Screen (Everything Else)

From the library, tap the gear icon to open the full Settings screen. You can also reach it from the bottom of the Appearance Sheet via the "App Settings" link.

The Settings screen contains:

Theme — same theme grid, accessible outside the reader
Reading Chrome — header/footer content, tap zones
Reading Goals — daily targets, reminders
Dictionary — configure lookup sources
Library — default sort
Custom Fonts — import your own typefaces (Wizard Mode)
Language — app language preference
Data Management — export and import
Privacy — crash reporting
Advanced — Wizard Mode, split reader options
About — version, licenses, tips reset

Global vs. Per-Book Settings

This is the single most powerful concept in ScrollWizard's settings. Every visual setting — font, size, theme, margins, line height, everything in the Appearance Sheet — can be set globally (for all books) or per book (just for this one).

When you open the Appearance Sheet while reading a book, you'll see a toggle at the top: This Book and All Books.

This Book — changes apply only to the book you're currently reading. Anything you don't override falls back to the global default.
All Books — changes become the new global default for every book that doesn't have its own override.

Two extra buttons appear in "This Book" mode:

Copy to Global — takes this book's current settings and makes them the global default
Reset Book Settings — clears all per-book overrides so the book uses global defaults again

For the curious: per-book settings are stored as overrides. If you set only the font for a specific book, everything else (size, margins, theme) still comes from your global settings. Change your global font size later, and that book picks it up — unless it has its own font size override.

Typography

Open the Appearance Sheet and you'll find the Typography section first. These are the settings that determine how text looks on the page.

Font Family

ScrollWizard ships with 12 selectable fonts — three bundled (always available, always consistent) and nine system fonts (provided by iOS):

Category	Fonts
Bundled	Literata, Source Serif, OpenDyslexic
System serif	Georgia, Palatino, Charter, Iowan Old Style, New York, Athelas
System sans-serif	Helvetica Neue, Seravek
System monospace	Menlo

There's also a Publisher option at the top of the picker, which keeps the book's own embedded font when it has one and falls back to Literata when it doesn't.

The default is Literata — a variable serif designed specifically for long-form reading. It's excellent. But if you prefer sans-serif for non-fiction or a specific face for a language, the picker is a scroll wheel tap away.

OpenDyslexic is right there in the font list, not hidden in accessibility settings. If it helps you, use it. If it doesn't, skip it. No judgment either way.

With Wizard Mode unlocked, you can also import your own fonts (TTF or OTF) from the Settings screen under Custom Fonts. Imported fonts appear at the top of the font picker. More on that in the Custom Fonts section below.

Device	Default size
iPhone	18pt
iPad mini / iPad Air compact	19pt
iPad 11" and larger	20pt

Line Height

Controls the spacing between lines of text. Range: 1.0 to 3.0, default 1.6. Lower values pack more text on screen; higher values give each line room to breathe. If you've increased the font size and the lines feel tight, nudge line height up a little to give them room.

Letter Spacing and Word Spacing

Fine-tune the space between individual characters (letter spacing: -2.0 to 5.0, default 0.0) and between words (word spacing: -2.0 to 10.0, default 0.0). Most people leave these at zero, but they're valuable for accessibility or for taming fonts that feel too tight or too loose.

Text Alignment

Four options, selected via icon buttons:

Option	Description
Left	Ragged right edge, natural reading rhythm
Center	Centered text (mostly for poetry)
Right	Right-aligned (for RTL-adjacent layouts)
Justified	Even left and right edges (default)

Justified text looks clean but can create uneven word spacing when the line length is short. If you notice "rivers" of white space, try switching to left-aligned — especially on phones.

Paragraph Indent and Spacing

Paragraph Indent — first-line indent in em units (0.0 to 5.0, default 1.5). Set to 0 for block-style paragraphs.
Paragraph Spacing — space between paragraphs in em units (0.0 to 3.0, default 0.5). Increase this if you set indent to 0, so paragraphs don't run together.

Hyphenation

On by default. Automatic hyphenation breaks long words at line ends to keep justified text looking even. Turn it off if you find the hyphens distracting — this is purely a preference.

Publisher Formatting

Off by default. When enabled, ScrollWizard respects the book's embedded CSS for paragraph styling (text-indent, margins, etc.) instead of applying your settings. Useful for books with intentional typographic design — poetry collections, textbooks with special layouts, or publisher ebooks that were carefully typeset.

Layout

Below Typography in the Appearance Sheet, the Layout section controls page structure.

Margins & Reading Width

Three controls here:

Top Margin and Bottom Margin — two sliders, each adjustable from 0 to 80 logical pixels (both default to 24). They set the breathing room above and below the text on every page.
Reading Width — a single slider that sets your target line length in characters per line, from 40 (Narrow) up to 110, with one extra notch at the very end labelled Full. The default is 66 characters — the classic comfy book line. There's a little haptic tick as you cross back over the default, so it's easy to find again.

The clever part: Reading Width is measured in characters, not pixels, so it travels with you. Set it once and the same comfortable line length follows you from iPhone to iPad without re-tuning. ScrollWizard aims for that target measure and then clamps to whatever your screen can actually fit — so on a narrow phone a wide setting simply fills the screen rather than overflowing. Slide all the way to Full to drop the cap entirely and let text run edge to edge. The readout under the slider shows roughly how many characters wide your lines currently are.

Page Turn Animation

Three styles:

Animation	Description
None	Instant page change, no animation
Slide	Pages slide left/right (default)
Fade	Crossfade between pages

Pick whichever feels natural. "None" is fastest for people who read quickly and don't want to wait for transitions.

Themes

ScrollWizard comes with five built-in themes and lets you create unlimited custom themes.

Built-in Themes

Theme	Background	Text	Mood
Light	White	Near-black	Clean, daytime reading
Dark	Near-black	Light gray	Easy on the eyes at night
Sepia	Warm beige	Dark brown	Paper-like warmth
Solarized Dark	Deep teal	Muted gray-green	The developer favorite
Nord	Slate blue	Pale blue-gray	Cool, arctic calm

Switch themes from the Appearance Sheet's Theme section — just tap a theme swatch. You can also switch from the Settings screen if you're not currently in the reader.

Custom Themes

Tap Create Custom Theme to open the theme editor. You can set:

Background color
Text color
Link color
Accent color (used for UI elements like buttons and highlights)
Selection color (used when selecting text)

There's no "this is a dark theme" switch to flip — ScrollWizard works it out for you from the background color's luminance. Pick a dark background and the theme behaves as a dark theme; pick a light one and it behaves as a light theme.

Custom themes appear alongside built-in ones in the theme grid. Long-press a custom theme to edit or delete it.

For the curious: each custom theme gets a unique ID. Per-book theme overrides reference this ID, so if you delete a custom theme that a book was using, that book reverts to the global default.

Per-Book Themes

In the Appearance Sheet, switch to "This Book" mode and select a different theme. That book will always open with its own theme, regardless of your global choice. A hint below the theme grid shows the global theme name for reference.

Display

The Display section controls screen-level settings that affect all themes.

Hide Status Bar

On by default. Hides the iOS status bar (time, battery, signal) while reading for a more immersive experience. The reading chrome (header/footer) provides a clock if you still want the time visible.

Quick brightness note: there's no brightness slider buried in Settings — screen brightness lives in the reader's quick controls, right next to the page you're reading, so you can nudge it without leaving the book.

Swap Colors

In the Theme section there's one more handy toggle: Swap Colors. It flips the text and background colors of your current theme — a quick one-tap way to get a dark look without switching themes entirely. The swap applies to the current theme and persists until you toggle it off, and like every visual setting it can be set per book.

Reading Chrome

In the Settings screen, the Reading Chrome section controls what information appears while you read.

Header and Footer

Both are off by default — ScrollWizard starts you with a clean, chrome-free page. Toggle each on independently when you want it. When enabled, you can configure which items appear:

Available Item	Description
Chapter Title	Name of the current chapter
Book Title	Title of the book
Page in Chapter	Current page number within the chapter
Progress %	Overall reading progress as a percentage
Book Progress	Visual progress indicator for the whole book
Chapter Progress	Visual progress indicator for the current chapter
Time Remaining	Estimated time to finish (based on your reading speed)
Clock	Current time

Default header items: Chapter Progress and Chapter Title. Default footer items: Page in Chapter, Progress %, and Clock.

Tap the items to open a picker where you can toggle each one on or off. On phones with a notch or Dynamic Island, the chrome tucks into the safe area, so it costs no reading space. On older flat-top devices it sits just below, taking about 24px.

Tap Zones

The screen is divided into three invisible zones — left, center, and right. Each can be assigned one of four actions:

Action	What it does
Previous	Go to the previous page
Next	Go to the next page
Menu	Toggle the toolbar
None	Do nothing

Defaults: left = previous, center = menu, right = next.

If you're a pure swiper, you might set all three to "none" or "menu." If you read left-to-right manga, you might flip left and right. The combinations are yours.

Haptic Feedback

Enabled by default. Provides a subtle vibration when you turn pages via tap. Disable it in Settings if you prefer silent page turns.

Reading Goals & Reminders

Set daily targets to build a reading habit — or don't. Goals are entirely optional and off by default.

Daily Page Goal

Preset options: Off, 10, 20, 30, 50, 75 pages. A custom value up to 500 can be entered. Since EPUBs don't have fixed page numbers, ScrollWizard estimates from your reading time at roughly 0.75 minute per page. Think of it as a "read for about this long" target.

Daily Time Goal

Preset options: Off, 15, 20, 30, 45, 60 minutes. A custom value up to 180 can be entered. This one is precise — it measures your actual reading duration.

If you're starting fresh, 15 or 30 minutes is a solid first goal. Something you'll actually hit. You can always raise it later.

Reading Reminder

Toggle on to receive a daily notification nudging you to read. Set the time with a picker (default: 8:00 PM). The notification is local — no server, no internet required. Toggle off and it stops immediately.

Annual Book Goal

Set from the Stats panel (swipe in from the right edge) or from Settings. Choose how many books you want to finish this year. ScrollWizard tracks completions and shows pace projections. Set to 0 to disable.

For more on goals and statistics, see the Track Your Reading Guide.

Dictionary

The Dictionary section in Settings controls where ScrollWizard looks up word definitions when you select a word and tap "Look Up."

Default Sources

Four dictionaries come pre-configured:

Source	Type	Description
Free Dictionary	Inline API	Shows definitions directly in a popup, no browser needed
Wiktionary	Web	Opens in a browser view
Merriam-Webster	Web	Opens in a browser view
Oxford Dictionary	Web	Opens in a browser view

Each source has a toggle to enable or disable it. The Free Dictionary API is the default — it provides inline definitions without leaving the reader.

Adding Custom Dictionaries

Tap Add Web Dictionary to add any dictionary that uses a URL pattern. Enter a name and a URL template with {word} as the placeholder (e.g., https://dictionary.example.com/search?q={word}). ScrollWizard replaces {word} with the looked-up term.

Web dictionaries can be edited or deleted. The built-in Free Dictionary API cannot be removed.

Local Dictionaries

Tap Import from iCloud to scan your iCloud Drive for local dictionary files (JSON format). ScrollWizard detects dictionary files and adds them as offline lookup sources — no internet required for definitions.

Local dictionaries appear with a "Local" badge. They're especially useful for specialized vocabulary, languages not covered by the default sources, or reading on planes.

Custom Fonts

This feature requires Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase).

Import your own TTF or OTF font files and use them as the reader font. Imported fonts appear at the top of the font picker alongside the built-in options.

Importing Fonts

Open Settings > Custom Fonts.
Tap Import Font.
Select one or more TTF/OTF files from the iOS file picker.
Each font appears with a preview showing the font name rendered in itself, file size, and the date it was added.

Managing Fonts

Swipe left on any imported font to delete it. A confirmation dialog appears — deleting a font that a book is using will cause that book to fall back to the global default font.

Tip: Look for free, high-quality fonts on Google Fonts or Font Squirrel. Fonts with good Unicode coverage work best for multilingual reading.

If Wizard Mode isn't unlocked, the Custom Fonts section shows a teaser with a tap-to-unlock prompt.

Library Settings

Default Sort

The library remembers how you like your books ordered. The options are:

Last Read (default) — most recently opened books first
Date Added — newest imports first
Title — alphabetical by title
Author — alphabetical by author
Progress — by how far through you are

You change the sort from the left sidebar (filtering and sorting both live in the sidebar — there's no top filter bar), and ScrollWizard keeps your choice for next time.

Language

ScrollWizard supports 12 languages: Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, and Chinese.

By default, ScrollWizard follows your device's system language. To override this:

Open Settings > Language.
Tap Language.
Choose a language from the list (shown in native script for easy identification), or select System Default to follow iOS again.

The language setting affects the app's interface, not the content of your books.

Privacy

Crash Reporting

Off by default. When enabled, ScrollWizard sends anonymous crash reports via Sentry to help identify and fix bugs. No personal data, no reading history, no book content — just stack traces and device info.

Disabling crash reporting closes the connection immediately. Re-enabling takes effect on the next app launch.

Privacy Policy

A link to the ScrollWizard privacy policy at scrollwizard.com/privacy.

Data Management

Tap Export / Import Data in Settings to open the Data Management sheet.

Export Options

Format	What's Included
Full Backup (JSON)	Everything — books, settings, smart collections, tags, highlights, bookmarks, reading sessions, vocabulary words, yearly goals, RSVP sessions
Annotations (Markdown)	All your highlights and notes across your whole library, formatted for Obsidian/Logseq

Annotation export is library-wide and Markdown-only — it produces a single .md file. Both exports use the iOS share sheet, so you can save to Files, AirDrop, email, or any other destination.

Note: there's no "export from the reader" action. Annotation export lives here, in Data Management. If you want richer, structured exports to Obsidian, Notion, or Logseq — per book or whole library — that's the Knowledge Export feature, covered in the Export Guide.

Import

Import from a previously exported JSON backup to restore your data. Exporting a backup before any destructive action is always a good idea.

Delete All Data

A danger-zone option that wipes everything — books, settings, highlights, bookmarks, reading history, passwords, and iCloud sync data. Two confirmation dialogs stand between you and a blank slate. This cannot be undone.

Advanced (Wizard Mode)

The Advanced section shows Wizard Mode status and related settings.

Wizard Mode — tap to unlock (a one-time purchase). Once unlocked, a checkmark appears.
Open Footnotes in Reference Pane (Wizard Mode) — when in split mode, footnote links open in the side pane instead of a popup. Off by default.
Restore Purchase — visible when Wizard Mode isn't unlocked. Tap to check for a previous purchase.

About

Version — the current app version. (If you tap it 42 times, something happens. We won't spoil it.)
Open Source Licenses — full list of the open-source libraries ScrollWizard uses.

Default Settings Reference

Here's a quick-reference table of every key setting, its default value, and its range. Useful when you've tweaked everything and want to know what "factory settings" looks like.

Setting	Default	Range
Font Family	Literata	12 selectable + custom
Font Size	18pt (phone)	10—48pt
Line Height	1.6	1.0—3.0
Letter Spacing	0.0	-2.0—5.0
Word Spacing	0.0	-2.0—10.0
Text Alignment	Justified	Left, Center, Right, Justified
Paragraph Indent	1.5 em	0.0—5.0 em
Paragraph Spacing	0.5 em	0.0—3.0 em
Hyphenation	On	On/Off
Publisher Formatting	Off	On/Off
Top / Bottom Margin	24 / 24	0—80 each
Reading Width	66 characters	40—110 chars, or Full
Page Turn Animation	Slide	None, Slide, Fade
Theme	Light	5 built-in + custom
Hide Status Bar	On	On/Off
Tap Zone Left	Previous	Previous, Next, Menu, None
Tap Zone Center	Menu	Previous, Next, Menu, None
Tap Zone Right	Next	Previous, Next, Menu, None
Haptic Feedback	On	On/Off
Show Header	Off	On/Off
Show Footer	Off	On/Off
Daily Page Goal	Off	Off, 10—75
Daily Time Goal	Off	Off, 15—60 min
Reading Reminder	Off	On/Off
Reminder Time	8:00 PM	Any time
Library Sort	Last Read	Last Read, Date Added, Title, Author, Progress
Crash Reporting	Off	On/Off

Tips & Tricks

Start with font and size, then stop. Most people only need to change two or three settings. Literata at 18pt with justified text and the default line height works wonderfully for the vast majority of books. Only dig into the advanced controls when something feels off.

Use per-book settings for outliers. If one book has unusual formatting or you want a different mood for a specific genre, set overrides for that book and leave your global settings alone. It's the best of both worlds.

The reset button is your friend. Every slider in the Appearance Sheet has a reset button that returns it to the default value. If you've gotten lost in the weeds, tap reset and start over. No harm done.

Custom themes for reading contexts. Create a "Night" theme with very dark gray (not pure black) and slightly warm text. Create a "Focus" theme with your favorite bold accent color. Create an "Old Paper" theme that looks like aged parchment. The editor lets you pick any color.

Export before experimenting. If you're about to make big changes to your data or settings, export a backup first via Settings > Data Management. It takes five seconds and can save you from regret.

Swipe gestures are configurable. Vertical swipe up and swipe down can be mapped to brightness control, font size adjustment, or RSVP speed reading (Wizard Mode). The default is "none" for both — assign them if you want quick in-reader adjustments without opening any menus.

Language doesn't affect your books. Changing the app language only changes ScrollWizard's interface. Your books display in whatever language they were written in.

What's Next

You've made ScrollWizard yours. Now put it to use.

New to the app? The Getting Started Guide covers importing books, navigation, and the basics.
Tracking your reading habit? The Track Your Reading Guide covers goals, statistics, and reminders in depth.
Highlighting and annotating? The Annotations & Highlights Guide covers five-color highlights, notes, and the annotation timeline.
Saving words from your reading? The Save Words guide covers the dictionary, your saved-word list, and export.
Exporting to your knowledge tools? The Export Guide covers Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, and more.
Using the speed reader or split view? The RSVP Speed Reader Guide and Split Reader Guide cover Wizard Mode's advanced tools.

Every setting exists so the app gets out of your way and the book takes over. Once you've dialed in your setup, you'll forget the settings are even there.

Happy reading.

Annotations & Highlights

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

You finished a book last month. You remember loving a passage somewhere in chapter twelve — something about memory, or was it identity? You could almost quote it. Almost. That "almost" is the gap between reading and keeping what you read.

ScrollWizard gives you five highlight colors, two visual styles, free-form notes, bookmarks, a cross-book Marks list, and real export — Markdown out of the box, plus tool-shaped files for Obsidian, Notion, and Logseq. Everything in this guide is free — no annotation limits, no paywall after ten highlights, no premium tier for export. Your marginalia is yours from day one.

You don't need to read this whole guide before you start highlighting. Select text, pick a color, done. Everything else here is for when you're curious.

Creating a Highlight

Drag your finger across a sentence that matters, and it stays marked — not just in the book, but in a place you can actually find it again.

Long-press on a word in the reader, then drag the selection handles to cover the passage you want.
A context menu appears with three options: Copy, Highlight, and Define.
Tap Highlight. The selected text is instantly highlighted in yellow.
The highlight edit sheet slides up from the bottom, where you can change the color, switch the visual style, and add a note.

That's it. Two taps and a drag. The edit sheet is optional — if yellow with no note is fine, just tap away to dismiss it and keep reading.

The Five Colors

Five highlight colors means five categories that make sense to you. The colors are named by color — Yellow, Green, Blue, Red, Purple (yellow is the default; tap to switch among the five fixed colors).

Color	Suggested Use
Yellow	Key passages and main ideas
Green	Points you agree with or endorse
Blue	Terms and definitions worth remembering
Red	Things that raise questions or need revisiting
Purple	Action items or things to follow up on

Tap any color circle in the edit sheet to switch. The selected color shows a checkmark. Your choice is saved immediately.

There's no wrong color. Some people use yellow for everything. Others build a strict system — green for ideas they agree with, red for things they want to challenge. One reader uses blue for "confused" and red for "angry at the author" — and that's a legitimate system. The table above is a suggestion, not a rulebook.

The payoff comes later. The Marks list (covered below) lets you filter by color across all your books. If you consistently mark questions in red, you can pull up every open question from everything you've ever read with a single tap.

Highlight vs. Underline

Every highlight can use one of two visual styles, toggled with the segmented control in the edit sheet.

Highlight fills the text background with a translucent wash of your chosen color. This is the most visible option and the default.

Underline draws a colored line beneath the text without filling the background. More subtle — good for marking something without obscuring the text around it.

You can switch styles at any time by tapping the highlight to reopen the edit sheet. The change renders immediately.

When to use underline: Dark reading themes. A yellow background highlight on a dark theme can look harsh. Underline preserves the color indicator while keeping the atmosphere intact. It's also useful when you're highlighting densely — if half the page is filled, background washes become visually noisy. Underlines stay clean.

Adding Notes

A highlight says "this matters." A note says why it matters — and your future self will thank you for the extra ten seconds.

The edit sheet includes a multi-line text field with an "Add a note..." placeholder. Type your thoughts, questions, or context below the highlighted passage.

Notes auto-save as you type. There's a brief delay before writing to the database (so it doesn't save on every keystroke), and any pending changes are flushed when you dismiss the sheet. You never need to tap a save button. You can close the book right after writing a note and it will be there next time.

To edit a note later, tap the highlight in the reader to reopen the edit sheet.

Your notes don't have to be clever. "I like this" is a perfectly good annotation. So is "huh." So is a single question mark. "Disagree — see Ch.4" is three words and enormously useful six months later. You're writing for yourself, not for publication. Write in fragments, shorthand, inside jokes with yourself. The point is to leave a trace of what you were thinking.

Bookmarks

Some pages you need to come back to before you've figured out why. A bookmark holds your place with no questions asked.

Adding a Bookmark

Tap the bookmark icon in the reader toolbar. The icon fills in to show the page is bookmarked. Tap it again to remove it — it's a toggle.

No confirmation dialog on either action. Bookmarks are cheap and fast. Use them liberally. Bookmark the chapter you're on before closing the app. Bookmark the index. Bookmark the page with the map. They cost nothing and save real time.

Viewing Bookmarks

Tap the Contents icon (the list button) in the reader toolbar to open the table-of-contents sheet.
Switch to the Bookmarks tab. The sheet has three tabs across the top: Contents, Bookmarks, and Highlights.
The tab lists all bookmarks for this book, sorted by page number.
Tap any bookmark to jump there. Tap the trash icon to delete it.

Browsing Highlights (Per-Book)

While reading, you can browse all highlights for the current book without leaving the reader — same sheet as bookmarks, just a different tab.

Tap the Contents icon (the list button) in the reader toolbar.
Switch to the Highlights tab.
The tab lists all highlights for this book, sorted by chapter.

Each row shows a color bar on the left edge, the highlighted text (italic, up to 2 lines), a note preview if one exists, and a chapter reference. Tap any row to jump to that chapter. Tap the trash icon to delete.

This is your per-book view — quick and focused. For cross-book browsing, read on.

The Marks List (Cross-Book)

Every highlight and note across every book — one place, no digging. This is where scattered marginalia becomes a reading record you never had to sit down and write. It lives in the Notes panel, one of the four panels that slide in from the right edge of the screen.

Getting There

Swipe in from the right edge (or tap the right-edge handle) to open the panel stack, then open the Notes panel. Under Marks you'll see your most recent highlights; tap See all to open the full Marks list.

(Bookmarks aren't here — they live inside each book, in the reader's Contents sheet under the Bookmarks tab. The Marks list is highlights and notes only.)

How It Works

The Marks list gathers your highlights from every book and groups them by book, each section under the book's cover and title. Newest highlights come first within the whole set.

Each row shows the highlighted text, a note if one exists, the color, and — when you're looking across more than one book — which book it came from. Tap any row to jump straight to that passage in the reader.

Seeing a philosophy highlight next to a novel highlight next to a textbook highlight is the point. Open it after a few weeks of reading and you'll see something unexpected: a map of your attention across every book you've touched.

Filtering

Book filter chips appear as a horizontal scrolling row when you have highlights in more than one book. Tap a book to filter; tap again to deselect. "All Books" resets.

Color filter chips appear below — five colored dots matching the highlight colors, plus "All."

Filters compose together. You can narrow to "only blue highlights in Moby Dick" with two taps. This is where a consistent color-coding system pays off.

Search

Tap the search icon to toggle a search field. Search is real-time (results update as you type), case-insensitive, and searches both highlight text and note content. It composes with active filters — search within your already-filtered set.

When you remember the idea but not the page, this is where you go.

Removing

Swipe any row to remove it. A brief Undo appears in case you didn't mean it, and removed items wait in Recently Removed (also in the Notes panel) before they're cleared for good — so a slip of the thumb isn't permanent.

Exporting Your Annotations

Your highlights belong to you, not to the app. Get them out wherever your thinking lives.

Copy One Highlight

The fastest path is the smallest one. In the reader, select a passage and tap Copy in the selection menu — the text lands on your clipboard, ready to paste anywhere. No screen to open, no format to choose.

Export Everything as Markdown

To pull out your whole library's annotations at once, go to Settings ▸ Data Management (the Settings panel is in the right-edge panel stack) and tap Export Annotations. ScrollWizard builds a single Markdown (.md) file — highlights as blockquotes, notes inline, grouped by book with chapter references, your bookmarks listed alongside — and hands it to the iOS share sheet. From there, drop it into Files, mail it to yourself, or send it to a notes app.

Highlights export in book order (by chapter), not creation order — even if you highlighted chapter 10 before chapter 3. (The same screen's Export All Data makes a full JSON backup of everything; that's a backup, covered below, not an annotation export.)

Knowledge Export (Obsidian / Notion / Logseq)

When you want files shaped for a specific tool, ScrollWizard has a dedicated Knowledge Export screen. Open the Notes panel from the right edge and tap Export. It writes a file (or one file per book) and hands it to the iOS share sheet.

Five target formats:

Obsidian — YAML frontmatter + callout syntax. Drop the file into your vault and every field is Dataview-queryable.
Notion — Property table at the top (Author, Progress, Highlights, Tags) formatted for Notion's database import.
Logseq — Page properties with [[double-bracket links]] for tags. Highlight blocks include collapsed:: true.
Markdown — Clean, generic Markdown. Works anywhere.
JSON — Structured data with all metadata.

Toggle what's included: book metadata, highlights, bookmarks, notes, chapter grouping. Export a single book or your entire library (one file per book). See the Export Guide for the full walkthrough.

Tips & Tricks

You know the basics. Here's where it gets fun.

Highlight too much rather than too little. You can always filter later. You can't go back and highlight the sentence you wish you'd saved.

Export before finishing a book. When you reach the last chapter, export your annotations as Markdown (Settings ▸ Data Management ▸ Export Annotations) and send the file to your notes app. You'll have a clean summary while the book is fresh.

Check the Marks list periodically. Scrolling through your recent highlights across all books is a surprisingly effective way to reinforce what you've read. It's also where you'll notice unexpected connections between books.

Back up your data. Settings ▸ Data Management ▸ Export All Data writes a full JSON backup of your library data — book details, highlights, bookmarks, reading sessions, themes, and more. (Your actual EPUB and PDF files live in iCloud Drive and back up separately.) Export periodically. Your annotations are never truly at risk.

iCloud keeps you in sync. Highlights and bookmarks sync automatically via iCloud. Start annotating on your iPhone, continue on your iPad. No account needed.

The dictionary is one tap away. The same text selection menu that creates highlights also offers Define — look up a word without leaving the page. Save it and it goes to your personal saved-words list, ready to export whenever you want it. See the Save Words guide for details.

PDF highlighting works too. The PDF reader shows color dots directly in the context menu for one-tap color selection. The flow is slightly different but the result is the same — highlights, notes, bookmarks, export, all of it.

What's Next

You don't need a system to start annotating. Most good systems emerge from use, not from planning. Highlight for a week, then look at what you've got. The pattern will tell you what your system is.

Everything above is yours — free, unlimited, exportable. Your books remember what you noticed.

Saving words from your reading? The Save Words guide picks up where highlighting leaves off.
Moving annotations into your workflow? The Export Guide covers every destination and format.
New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers the basics.

Happy reading — and happy annotating.

Connecting Calibre to ScrollWizard

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

You've spent hours — maybe years — curating your Calibre library. Tagging genres, cleaning metadata, organizing covers. It's a collection you're proud of.

There's just one problem: it's stuck on your computer.

This guide fixes that. In about five minutes, your entire Calibre library will be browsable from your iPhone or iPad, over your home Wi-Fi. No cloud accounts. No file transfers. No USB cables. Just your books, wherever you are.

What is Calibre and why use it?
Setting up Calibre Content Server
Connecting ScrollWizard to Calibre
Browsing and downloading books
Troubleshooting
Advanced: Remote access
Bonus: Built-in book catalogs

What is Calibre and Why Use It?

Calibre is a free, open-source e-book manager for macOS, Windows, and Linux. If you have a collection of EPUBs, Calibre is almost certainly the best way to organize them — it handles metadata, covers, format conversion, and much more.

ScrollWizard connects to Calibre through OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System), a standardized catalog format built on Atom feeds. It's the same protocol used by public libraries and digital bookstores. Calibre ships with a built-in Content Server that speaks OPDS out of the box. Turn it on, and ScrollWizard can see your entire library over Wi-Fi and download any book with a single tap.

What this gets you:

Browse your full Calibre library from your iPhone or iPad, complete with covers and metadata
Download books wirelessly — no USB cable, no email, no cloud upload
Keep Calibre as the single source of truth for your collection
Metadata, covers, and author information transfer automatically

Setting Up Calibre Content Server

Calibre already knows how to share your library over your network. You just need to turn it on.

Step 1: Install Calibre

If you don't have Calibre yet, download it from calibre-ebook.com/download. Add a few books to your library if it's empty — you'll want something to test with.

Step 2: Start the Content Server

Open Calibre on your computer.
Go to Preferences (the gear icon, or Cmd+P / Ctrl+P).
Under Sharing, click Content server.
Check Run server automatically when calibre starts (so you only do this once).
Note the port number — the default is 8080.
Click Start server if it isn't already running.
Click Apply.

Step 3: Verify It Works

Open a browser on the same computer and go to http://localhost:8080. You should see the Calibre Content Server web interface showing your library. If your books appear here, the server is working.

That's the Calibre side done. Leave it running.

Step 4 (Optional): Set Up Authentication

If you want to protect your library with a username and password:

In the Content Server preferences, click the User accounts tab.
Click Add new user.
Enter a username and password.
Check Require username and password to access the content server.
Click Apply.

Remember these credentials — you'll need them in ScrollWizard.

Connecting ScrollWizard to Calibre

Before You Start

Both your computer (running Calibre) and your iPhone or iPad (running ScrollWizard) must be on the same Wi-Fi network. This is the single most common source of connection issues, so double-check before proceeding.

Find Your Computer's IP Address

You'll need your computer's local IP address (it usually looks like 192.168.x.x or 10.0.x.x).

macOS: Open System Settings > Wi-Fi, click Details on your network, and find the IP address. Or in Terminal:

ipconfig getifaddr en0

Windows: Open Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi, click your network, and scroll to find the IPv4 address. Or in Command Prompt:

ipconfig

Linux:

hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'

Write it down. For this guide, we'll use 192.168.1.42 as an example — replace it with yours.

Open the Catalog Panel

OPDS browsing lives in the Catalog panel — one of the four panels in the right-edge stack (Notes, Stats, Catalog, Settings). Swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or tap the right-edge affordance) and select Catalog.

Let ScrollWizard Find It For You (the easy way)

If your computer is on the same Wi-Fi network, you may not need the IP address at all. Calibre advertises its Content Server over Bonjour, and ScrollWizard listens for it. In the Catalog panel, tap Find on network — any Calibre (or other OPDS) server within reach shows up under Discovered on network, ready to add with a tap. The browse runs for about ten seconds. (The first time, iOS asks for local-network permission; allow it, or discovery comes up empty.)

If nothing appears — some networks block Bonjour — add the library by hand, below.

Add Your Calibre Library by Hand

In the Catalog panel, tap Add a library….
Fill in:
Catalog name: anything you like (e.g., "My Calibre Library")
URL: http://192.168.1.42:8080/opds (your actual IP)
If you enabled authentication, check Requires authentication and enter your credentials.
Tap Verify Connection — you should see a green success message.
Tap Save.

Your username and password are kept in the iOS Keychain on this device only. They are never written into the catalog URL and never sync to your other devices — so you'll re-enter them once per device, and that's by design.

Non-default port? Replace 8080 with your port number.

Multiple Calibre libraries? Append the library ID to the URL:

http://192.168.1.42:8080/opds/My_Second_Library

The library ID is the name with spaces replaced by underscores.

Using SSL? Use https:// instead of http://.

Browsing and Downloading Books

Once your catalog is saved, tap it to browse. Your Calibre library appears — covers, categories, and all. Browse it the way you browse a bookstore.

Navigating Your Library

Recent additions — books you recently added to Calibre
Authors — browse alphabetically
Tags / Categories — your Calibre tags carry over
Search — find specific titles from the search bar

Tap any book for its detail sheet: cover, author, description, language, categories, and available formats.

Downloading a Book

Tap a book to see its details.
Under Available Formats, you'll see each format Calibre has (EPUB, PDF, MOBI, etc.).
Tap Download. ScrollWizard reads both EPUB and PDF — it grabs the EPUB by default, since that's the format it's happiest with, but a PDF download is one tap away under Other formats.

The download runs in the background with a progress indicator. Once complete, the book appears in your Library with its cover and metadata intact.

Only MOBI or AZW3 available? Those aren't supported. Use Calibre's converter: right-click the book > Convert books > set output to EPUB. Next time you browse from ScrollWizard, the EPUB will be available.

What Gets Transferred

The book file — EPUB or PDF, whichever you downloaded
Cover art — displayed in your library
Metadata — title, author, language, categories, and description
Duplicate detection — ScrollWizard checks if a book is already in your library (matched by title and author) and shows an "Already in library" badge

Downloaded books behave like any other import. Organize them into domains, smart collections, and tags from the Library Management guide, and apply per-book typography from Settings and Customization.

Troubleshooting

Almost all connection issues come down to one of three things. Here's how to fix them.

"Connection failed" or Timeout

The server isn't running. Open Calibre and verify the Content Server is active. Look for the green icon in Calibre's bottom-right status bar.

Wrong IP address. Home network IPs can change. Re-check your computer's current IP and update the catalog URL in ScrollWizard.

Different Wi-Fi networks. Your devices must be on the same network. Watch out for guest networks, 2.4 GHz vs. 5 GHz splits, or VPN connections routing traffic differently.

Firewall blocking the port. - macOS: System Settings > Network > Firewall — add Calibre to allowed apps - Windows: Windows Defender Firewall > Allow an app > Add Calibre (or allow port 8080) - Linux: sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp

Computer went to sleep. The Content Server stops when your computer sleeps. Keep it awake while downloading, or adjust your power settings.

Authentication Errors

HTTP 401 means the server requires credentials. Edit your catalog in ScrollWizard, check Requires authentication, and enter your username and password. Calibre credentials are case-sensitive.

Books Not Showing Up

Unsupported format only. ScrollWizard downloads EPUB and PDF. If a book is only available as MOBI or AZW3, convert it in Calibre first (right-click > Convert books > EPUB).

Standard Ebooks returns "401" or "authentication required." The Standard Ebooks catalog is gated behind a paid membership (see Built-in book catalogs). Without it, the feed refuses the connection. This isn't a Calibre problem — it's the catalog asking for credentials ScrollWizard can't supply.

Large library pagination. OPDS catalogs may paginate big result sets. Scroll down or use search to find specific books. Initial browsing of a library with thousands of books may take a moment while the catalog loads — this is normal.

Advanced: Remote Access

The setup above works on your home Wi-Fi. But what if you want your Calibre library from a coffee shop, a train, or another country?

You can. Here's how the power users do it.

Option 1: Tailscale (Recommended)

Tailscale creates a secure private network between your devices, wherever they are. Free for personal use.

Install Tailscale on your computer and your iPhone/iPad.
Sign in with the same account on both.
Find your computer's Tailscale IP (shown in the app, usually 100.x.x.x).
In ScrollWizard, add a catalog: http://100.x.x.x:8080/opds.

Your library is never exposed to the public internet. Simple and secure.

Option 2: VPN

If you already run a VPN server at home (WireGuard, OpenVPN, etc.), connect your iPad to it and use your computer's local IP as usual.

Option 3: Port Forwarding

Forward port 8080 on your router to your computer's local IP. This exposes your Calibre server to the internet.

Important: If you do this, you must enable authentication. Never expose a content server without a password. Consider also enabling HTTPS in Calibre's settings.

After port forwarding, use your public IP (find it at whatismyip.com):

http://YOUR_PUBLIC_IP:8080/opds

Your public IP may change unless you have a static IP or use dynamic DNS.

Bonus: Built-in Book Catalogs

Calibre isn't the only thing the Catalog panel can talk to. In the Catalog panel, tap Browse public catalogs and you'll find four catalogs ScrollWizard already knows about:

Free — public domain:

Project Gutenberg — 70,000+ free public-domain books. The world's oldest digital library, founded in 1971. Everything from Jane Austen to H.G. Wells.
ManyBooks — 50,000+ free e-books spanning every genre, including independently published works.
Feedbooks — A curated selection of public-domain works with polished metadata and covers.

Paid — membership required:

Standard Ebooks — Beautifully typeset editions of public-domain literature with custom cover art. The library itself is public domain, but the OPDS feed is open only to paid Standard Ebooks "Patrons Circle" members. Without that membership the feed simply refuses to connect (a "401"), and ScrollWizard won't prompt you for a login. It's a convenience preset for people who already support the project — not a free catalog.

They're all OPDS catalogs, just like your Calibre connection. Same interface, same one-tap downloads. Think of it as your library expanding beyond what's on your hard drive.

Moving Catalogs Between Devices

Built up a collection of OPDS subscriptions and want them on another device? You don't have to do anything — your catalog list syncs over iCloud, so the libraries you save on one device show up on the rest. One thing for safety: passwords never sync, so authenticated libraries (a login-protected Calibre server, Standard Ebooks Patrons Circle) ask you to sign in again on the new device.

Quick Reference

Detail	Value
Default Calibre port	8080
OPDS path	`/opds`
Full default URL	`http://YOUR_IP:8080/opds`
Multi-library URL	`http://YOUR_IP:8080/opds/Library_Name`
Authentication	Basic HTTP Auth (username + password, stored in the iOS Keychain)
Supported downloads	EPUB and PDF (EPUB preferred)
Connection timeout	~10 seconds
Auto-discovery	Bonjour, on the local network

That's it. Your Calibre library is on your phone. Your iPad. Wherever you read.

No subscriptions. No DRM. No corporate bookstore deciding what you can keep.

Happy reading.

Export to Obsidian, Notion & Logseq

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Your highlights belong in your knowledge system, not locked inside a reading app. ScrollWizard treats your annotations as your data — structured, portable, and one tap away from Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, or whatever you build your second brain in.

ScrollWizard's Knowledge Export writes files tailored to Obsidian (YAML frontmatter + callout syntax), Notion (property tables + clean blockquotes), Logseq (page properties + bullet outlines), generic Markdown, and JSON. Export a single book or your entire library. Toggle what's included. Share via the iOS share sheet. A single book is a few seconds; a full-library export takes longer the more you've got.

Every export format is completely free. No premium tier, no "upgrade to unlock PKM formats." Your data leaves whenever you want, in whatever format you want.

The Export Landscape

ScrollWizard has four separate export paths. They serve different purposes and work differently. Every one of them produces a file that goes out through the iOS share sheet — there's no "copy to clipboard" path lurking anywhere.

Export Path	Where to Find It	Output	Scope
Knowledge Export	Notes panel > Export knowledge	File (share sheet)	Single book or entire library
Annotation Export	Settings > Data Management > Export Annotations	Markdown file (share sheet)	Whole library
Vocabulary Export	Notes panel > Export vocabulary	File (share sheet)	All saved words
Full Data Backup	Settings > Data Management > Export All Data	JSON file (share sheet)	Everything in the database

Most of this guide focuses on Knowledge Export — that's where the Obsidian, Notion, and Logseq formats live. The other three are covered in shorter sections at the end.

Looking for an "export from the reader" button? There isn't one. The reader's only clipboard trick is copying a single highlight as plain text (long-press a highlight). Everything else flows through the panels and Settings paths above.

The Knowledge Export Screen

Every highlight, note, and bookmark from a book, gathered in one place and ready to leave.

Getting There

Swipe in from the right edge to open the panel stack, switch to the Notes panel, and tap Export knowledge.

Opened this way it exports your entire library. (The same screen can also be scoped to a single book, in which case it exports only that book's annotations.)

What You See

An info box at the top shows what you're exporting: the book title (or "All Books" for library-wide), highlight count, and bookmark count.

Five format buttons in a row:

Format	File Type
Obsidian	`.md`
Notion	`.md`
Logseq	`.md`
Markdown	`.md`
JSON	`.json`

Tap to select. A description box below updates to explain what the selected format produces. There's no wrong choice here — every format contains the same highlights and notes. The difference is just styling. You can export the same book in multiple formats, try each one, and keep what fits. Nothing is consumed by exporting.

Content Toggles

Toggle	Default	What It Controls
Book metadata	ON	Title, author, progress, tags
Highlights	ON	All highlighted passages
Bookmarks	ON	All bookmarked pages
Notes	ON	Text you added to highlights
Group by chapter	ON	Organizes highlights under chapter headings

All five default to ON. Turn off what you don't need. "Bookmarks only" gives you a clean page-reference list. "Highlights + Notes" gives you a pure reading journal.

Exporting

Tap Export & Share. ScrollWizard writes the file, then opens the iOS share sheet — save to Files, AirDrop to your Mac, drop into your vault, whatever you need.

Single-book export produces one file named after the book title (e.g., Moby_Dick.md).

Library-wide export bundles one file per book into a single ZIP archive named library_YYYYMMDD_HHmmss.zip — one item to hand to the share sheet, no stray folder left behind. Books with no annotations are skipped.

Exporting to Obsidian

YAML frontmatter, callout syntax, and a folder structure that feels like you set it up yourself. Drop the file into your vault and it works immediately — no plugins, no reformatting.

What the Output Looks Like

---
title: "Moby Dick"
author: "Herman Melville"
type: book
exported: 2026-04-04
tags:
  - fiction
  - classics
progress: 73%
highlights: 14
---

# Moby Dick
*by Herman Melville*

## Chapter 1 - Loomings

> [!yellow]
> Call me Ishmael.

**Note:** The most famous opening line in American literature.

> [!blue]
> Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth...

**Note:** This is the opening mood-setting passage.

## Bookmarks

- **Page 12**: Map of Nantucket
- **Page 89**: Cetology chapter start

Frontmatter Fields

Every field is Dataview-queryable. If you use Dataview, you can immediately run:

TABLE author, progress, highlights
FROM #book
WHERE progress < 100
SORT highlights DESC

Field	Value
`title`	Book title (quoted for YAML safety)
`author`	Author name
`type`	Always `book`
`exported`	Export date (YYYY-MM-DD)
`tags`	Array of your book tags
`progress`	Reading progress percentage
`highlights`	Total highlight count

Highlight Colors as Callouts

Each highlight uses Obsidian's callout syntax with the color as the callout type, drawn from ScrollWizard's five highlight colors: [!yellow], [!green], [!blue], [!red], [!purple]. If you've customized your Obsidian CSS to style these callout types, they'll render with your custom colors automatically.

Notes appear as bold text below their highlight.

Tips for Obsidian Users

Drop into your vault's inbox folder. The frontmatter means the file is already tagged and typed — move it into your permanent structure later.

Re-exporting overwrites. Same book = same filename. This means you can re-export after adding new highlights without accumulating duplicates.

Library export for vault seeding. Starting a reading vault from scratch? Library-wide export gives you a ready-made collection — one ZIP, one file per book, all with consistent frontmatter. Unzip it straight into your vault.

Exporting to Notion

Clean Markdown that imports into Notion without reformatting. A property table at the top replaces YAML frontmatter (which Notion ignores).

What the Output Looks Like

# Moby Dick

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Author | Herman Melville |
| Progress | 73% |
| Highlights | 14 |
| Exported | 2026-04-04 |
| Tags | fiction, classics |

## Highlights

> Call me Ishmael.
> — *Chapter 1 - Loomings*

  The most famous opening line in American literature.

> Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth...
> — *Chapter 1 - Loomings*

  This is the opening mood-setting passage.

## Bookmarks

- Page 12: Map of Nantucket
- Page 89: Cetology chapter start

The Property Table

Standard Markdown table that Notion renders cleanly. If you paste into a database page, you can reference these values in Notion formulas and filters.

The property table only appears when "Book metadata" is toggled on.

Tips for Notion Users

Import as a page. Use Import > Markdown. The property table, headings, and blockquotes all render correctly.

Create a reading database. If you maintain a Notion database of books, create a new page and paste the exported content. The property table gives you a quick-reference block at the top.

Tags are comma-separated. Notion won't auto-convert them to multi-select properties — set those manually in your database if you want filterable tags.

Exporting to Logseq

Block-based output with page references, designed to land in your graph and just work. Page properties and bullet outlines — Logseq's native structure.

What the Output Looks Like

title:: Moby Dick
author:: Herman Melville
type:: [[Book]]
exported:: [[2026-04-04]]
tags:: [[fiction]], [[classics]]
progress:: 73%

- ## Highlights
    - > Call me Ishmael.
      collapsed:: true
        - **Chapter:** Chapter 1 - Loomings
        - **Date:** 2026-03-15
        - **Color:** yellow
        - **Note:** The most famous opening line in American literature.
    - > Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth...
      collapsed:: true
        - **Chapter:** Chapter 1 - Loomings
        - **Date:** 2026-03-15
        - **Color:** blue
        - **Note:** This is the opening mood-setting passage.

- ## Bookmarks
    - Page 12: Map of Nantucket
    - Page 89: Cetology chapter start

Page Properties

Tags and dates use [[double brackets]] — they become clickable page references. type:: [[Book]] means you can query all books with {{query (property :type "Book")}}.

Collapsed Highlight Blocks

Each highlight has collapsed:: true, so metadata (chapter, date, color, note) is nested but hidden by default. You see a clean list of quotes. Expand any to see its details. This keeps pages scannable — Logseq's outliner works best when you can expand what you need.

Tips for Logseq Users

Drop into your pages folder. Place the .md file in your graph's pages/ directory. Logseq picks it up on next refresh.

Graph connections happen automatically. Tags as [[brackets]] link to your tag pages and journal dates immediately.

Generic Markdown

Plain Markdown with no app-specific formatting — works everywhere, depends on nothing. Bear, Ulysses, iA Writer, Apple Notes, GitHub, a text editor.

# Moby Dick
*by Herman Melville*

**Progress:** 73%
**Exported:** 2026-04-04
**Tags:** fiction, classics

---

## Chapter 1 - Loomings

> Call me Ishmael.

*The most famous opening line in American literature.*

> Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth...

*This is the opening mood-setting passage.*

## Bookmarks

- **Page 12:** Map of Nantucket
- **Page 89:** Cetology chapter start

Metadata as bold lines, highlights as blockquotes, notes in italics, chapter grouping optional. If you don't use Obsidian, Notion, or Logseq — or if you want a single canonical export you can transform yourself — this is your format.

JSON Export

Structured data for the people who'd rather write their own integration than use someone else's.

{
  "book": {
    "title": "Moby Dick",
    "author": "Herman Melville",
    "progress": 0.73,
    "tags": ["fiction", "classics"],
    "exportedAt": "2026-04-04T14:30:00.000Z"
  },
  "highlights": [
    {
      "text": "Call me Ishmael.",
      "note": "The most famous opening line in American literature.",
      "color": "yellow",
      "chapterIndex": 0,
      "chapterTitle": "Chapter 1 - Loomings",
      "createdAt": "2026-03-15T10:22:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "text": "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth...",
      "note": "This is the opening mood-setting passage.",
      "color": "blue",
      "chapterIndex": 0,
      "chapterTitle": "Chapter 1 - Loomings",
      "createdAt": "2026-03-15T10:23:00.000Z"
    }
  ],
  "bookmarks": [
    {
      "label": "Map of Nantucket",
      "pageIndex": 11,
      "createdAt": "2026-03-15T09:00:00.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

Pretty-printed with 2-space indentation. Progress is a decimal (0.73 = 73%). Page indices are zero-based. Timestamps are ISO 8601. Feed into jq, pipe into a script, import into a database, build a custom template. JSON is the escape hatch when the five built-in formats don't match your workflow.

Annotation Export (the quick, no-frills dump)

When you don't need the PKM styling and just want every highlight and bookmark in one plain file, there's a simpler path that skips the format picker entirely.

Settings > Data Management > Export Annotations

It walks your whole library, gathers every highlight and bookmark grouped by book, writes a single Markdown file (scrollwizard_annotations.md), and hands it to the iOS share sheet. No format choice, no content toggles — one button, one file.

How it differs from Knowledge Export: always the whole library (not a single book), always Markdown (no Obsidian/Notion/Logseq/JSON variants), no toggles. It's the "give me everything, plain" button. Knowledge Export is for deliberately shaping data for a specific PKM tool.

And if you only want one highlight? Long-press it in the reader and copy it as plain text — straight to the clipboard, no file involved. That's the only clipboard path in the whole app.

Vocabulary Export

Your saved words have their own export path. Covered in detail in the Save Words guide — here's the summary.

Tap the share button on the Words screen:

Format	File	Best For
Anki CSV	`.txt`	Direct Anki import. Front: word + phonetic. Back: HTML definition. Tags: `book::Title`.
TSV	`.tsv`	Spreadsheets. Every stored field, one row per word.
JSON	`.json`	Backups, scripts, or any tool that reads JSON.

Full Data Backup

Your entire library — books, annotations, settings — in a single file you control. This isn't a PKM export — it's a complete database dump.

Settings > Data Management > Export All Data as JSON

The backup includes:

Table	Contents
`books`	All book metadata
`book_progress`	Reading position / progress (kept separate so it survives a reinstall)
`domains`	Folders / domains
`tags`, `book_tags`	Tags and their book assignments
`highlights`	Every highlight with text, color, notes
`bookmarks`	Every bookmark
`reading_sessions`	Reading time tracking
`reading_settings`, `book_reading_settings`	Global and per-book settings
`themes`	Custom reading themes
`dictionary_sources`	Dictionary configuration
`smart_collections`	Your smart collections
`opds_catalogs`	Catalog subscriptions (credentials are not exported — re-authenticate on restore)
`yearly_goals`	Reading goals
`download_history`	Catalog download history
`vocabulary_words`	Saved words with their definitions and context
`rsvp_sessions`	Speed-reader session history

The file includes a schema version field and exportedAt timestamp. Use it before device migrations, as insurance against accidental deletion, or for building reading analytics from the session data.

Your annotations live in ScrollWizard's local database and sync to iCloud. Export creates a copy — it doesn't move or delete anything. You can export the same book a hundred times.

Tips & Tricks

Export early, export often. Don't wait until you finish a book. Re-exporting overwrites the previous file — no duplicate management.

Use library export to seed a vault. Starting an Obsidian vault or Logseq graph from scratch? One export, one ZIP of ready-to-use book notes — unzip and go.

Color-code with export in mind. If you consistently use yellow for key ideas and blue for definitions, the Obsidian callout types and Logseq color labels make those categories filterable in your PKM tool. The system you build in ScrollWizard carries over.

Grab a single quote fast. Reading and want to send someone one favorite line? Long-press the highlight, copy as plain text, paste into a message. No export screen needed.

JSON is the universal escape hatch. None of the formats match? Export JSON and transform with a script. Clean structure, every field documented by the output itself.

Back up separately. Knowledge Export covers annotations. Full Data Backup covers everything — reading progress, sessions, themes, dictionary settings. Think of it as your save file.

What's Next

From reading to knowing — no friction in between. Pick the format that matches where your thinking lives, and the data flows there — a single book in a few seconds, a full-library export longer the more you've got.

Building your annotation system? The Annotations & Highlights Guide covers colors, notes, bookmarks, and the timeline.
Saving words from your reading? The Save Words guide covers the dictionary, your saved-word list, and export.
New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers the basics.

Nothing stays trapped. Everything exports. Happy reading.

Getting Started with ScrollWizard

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Welcome. Here's what to do in the first ten minutes — and what to ignore until later.

ScrollWizard is a free EPUB and PDF reader for iPhone and iPad that puts you in complete control of your reading experience. Whether you're tearing through novels, studying textbooks, or browsing free classics from Project Gutenberg, ScrollWizard gives you the tools to read comfortably for hours: beautiful themes, fine-grained typography, built-in dictionaries, highlights with notes, and iCloud sync across all your devices.

No sign-up. No sign-in. Just open a book.

Getting Your First Book

Got an EPUB or PDF? You're ten seconds away from reading it.

Importing from Files

Open ScrollWizard. It opens straight to your Library — the one screen where all your books live. There's no row of tabs along the bottom; everything reaches out from here.
Tap the + button in the top-right corner. This opens the iOS file picker directly.
Navigate to your EPUB or PDF file — it can be in iCloud Drive, On My iPhone, or any connected cloud storage.
Select the file and ScrollWizard imports it. You'll see a progress indicator for larger files.
Your book appears in the library, ready to read.

ScrollWizard supports EPUB and PDF files up to 500 MB. You can select multiple files at once for batch import.

Tip: If someone sends you an EPUB via Messages, Mail, or AirDrop, use the iOS share sheet and choose "Open in ScrollWizard" to import it directly.

Reading Basics

Tap any book in your library to start reading. Swipe or tap to turn pages. That's the entire tutorial. But if you want to know every shortcut hiding in plain sight, read on.

Tap Zones

ScrollWizard divides the screen into three invisible zones:

Right side — tap to go to the next page
Left side — tap to go to the previous page
Center — tap to show or hide the toolbar

You can also swipe left/right to turn pages.

Some people swipe. Some people tap the edge. Some use the progress slider. You'll find your rhythm.

Tap the center of the screen to summon the controls. The toolbar gives you quick access to:

Back arrow — return to your library
Chapter title — shows your current position
Search — find any word or phrase in the book
Table of Contents — a tabbed sheet with three tabs: Contents (jump to any chapter, with nested sub-chapters), Bookmarks (this book's bookmark list), and Highlights (this book's highlights and notes)
Bookmark — bookmark the current page
Sparkles — opens the Wizard menu (Advanced Wizard Mode tools like the RSVP Speed Reader and Split Reader)

The Quick Settings Panel

While the toolbar is visible, a settings panel appears at the bottom with your most-used controls:

Font family picker
Font size adjuster
Line height adjuster
Theme switcher (swipe through your themes)
Page turn animation style
"More Settings" to open the full appearance sheet

Reading Chrome

Even with the toolbar hidden, ScrollWizard shows subtle reading info in the safe area (around the notch or Dynamic Island): current time, chapter title, page number, and reading progress. This uses no extra screen space since it sits in the area iOS already reserves.

While you're reading, ScrollWizard can also post a Live Activity to your Lock Screen and Dynamic Island showing your current chapter, progress, and estimated time remaining — so you can glance at where you are without unlocking. It's on by default; turn it off in Settings if you'd rather not.

Customizing Your Reading Experience

Deep typography controls, twelve fonts, and five themes. This is where ScrollWizard earns its name.

All of these settings are free.

Themes

Five built-in themes come ready to use:

Theme	Character
Light	Clean white background
Dark	Easy on the eyes in dim rooms
Sepia	Warm, paper-like tones
Solarized Dark	The beloved developer palette, adapted for reading
Nord	Cool, arctic-inspired blues

You can switch themes from the quick settings panel, or create entirely custom themes with your own background color, text color, and accent color. ScrollWizard reads the background's luminance to decide whether a custom theme behaves as light or dark — there's no separate light/dark switch to flip.

Tip: You can set a different theme per book. In the full appearance sheet, toggle between "This Book" and "Global" scope. Your study text can sit in sepia while the novel you read at night stays in a dark theme — each book keeps its own.

Typography

Open the full appearance sheet (tap "More Settings" in the quick panel) to access every typography control:

Setting	What it does
Font family	Choose from 12 fonts — 3 bundled (Literata, Source Serif, OpenDyslexic) plus 9 iOS system fonts like Georgia, Palatino, Charter, and New York. There's also a Publisher option that keeps the book's own font
Font size	Adjust from tiny to large
Line height	Control spacing between lines
Letter spacing	Fine-tune character spacing
Word spacing	Adjust space between words
Text alignment	Left, center, right, or justified
Paragraph indent	Set first-line indentation
Paragraph spacing	Control space between paragraphs
Hyphenation	Toggle automatic word hyphenation

Layout

Margins — adjust the top and bottom independently
Reading Width — a single slider that sets your line length (left and right are governed by this one control)
Page turn animation — pick the transition style: None, Slide, or Fade

Did you know? OpenDyslexic is right there in the font picker — not buried in accessibility settings.

Once you dial in your perfect setup, every other reading app will feel generic.

Organizing Your Library

Three books? A grid works fine. Three hundred? That's when smart collections start feeling less like a feature and more like a lifeline.

Before you get there: your library sorts by Last Read (newest first) out of the box, and you can switch to title, author, date added, or progress instead. The Filter and Sort controls live in the navigation bar and in the left sidebar — there's no separate filter bar across the top. Same grid, different order — enough on its own for small libraries, and the foundation under everything that follows.

Domains

Domains are the primary way to partition your library. Think of them as top-level folders — Fiction, Non-Fiction, Work, Study, or whatever categories make sense for you.

Open the left sidebar (swipe in from the left edge, or tap the sidebar button in the navigation bar).
Under Domains, tap Manage to create, rename, recolor, or delete domains.
Each domain gets a color-coded dot for visual distinction — pick from eight colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Magenta, or None).
Books belong to at most one domain. Books without a domain appear under "Unsorted."

No algorithm-generated shelves. No "recommended for you" clutter. You built this library. You organize it.

Smart Collections

Smart collections automatically group books based on rules. Built-in presets include:

Currently Reading — books you've started but not finished
Unread — books with 0% progress
Finished — books you've completed
Recently Added — your newest imports
Recently Read — books opened in the last few days

You can also create custom smart collections with your own filtering rules. Smart collections update themselves. You just read.

Search

The search bar at the top of the library filters your books by title and author. To search the actual text of a book — a phrase you half-remember, say — open the book and use in-book search, and ScrollWizard will jump straight to it.

Your books also show up in iOS Spotlight. Swipe down on your Home Screen, type a title or author, and your library is right there in system search.

Bookmarks, Highlights & Notes

Underline the sentence that stopped you mid-breath. Bookmark the page you want to come back to at 2 AM. Write a note your future self will thank you for.

Bookmarks

Tap the bookmark icon in the toolbar to bookmark the current page.
View all bookmarks in the Table of Contents sheet ▸ Bookmarks tab.
Tap any bookmark to jump back to that page.

Highlights

Select text and a highlight menu appears with five colors:

Color	Good for
Yellow	Key passages and main ideas
Green	Points you want to remember
Blue	Terms and definitions
Red	Things that raise questions or need revisiting
Purple	Anything else worth marking

Five colors, used however you like — the meanings above are just suggestions, and you can customize what each color means. No limit on how many. After highlighting, you can optionally add a note to capture your thoughts in context.

Annotation Timeline

Open the right-edge Notes panel to see your complete reading journal: all your highlights and notes across every book, newest first. Come back weeks later and see exactly what moved you. (To browse just the current book's highlights, use the Highlights tab in the reader's Table of Contents sheet; bookmarks live alongside it in that same sheet's Bookmarks tab.)

When you want it all out, ScrollWizard does a library-wide export — see the Knowledge Export note at the end. There's no per-book export button inside the reader.

Dictionary & Vocabulary

Long-press a word you don't know. Get the definition without leaving the page, without losing your place, without breaking the spell.

Select any word and tap Look Up (or Define) to see its definition in an inline popup — in EPUBs and PDFs. ScrollWizard pulls definitions from:

The Free Dictionary API — broad coverage, no sign-up, the default online source
A bundled offline Webster's 1913 — no network needed, always available

Configure dictionary behavior in Settings ▸ Dictionary. (You can also point at your own custom JSON dictionary if you have one.)

Saved Words

When you look up a word, you can save it to your personal list. ScrollWizard tracks the word, its definition, part of speech, and the sentence where you encountered it — and it works on both EPUB and PDF (PDF saves come with a page stamp).

Open the right-edge Notes panel and switch to its Words view to browse your saved words — sort by newest, oldest, or alphabetically. When you want to take them elsewhere, export the list as Anki-compatible CSV (.txt), TSV, or JSON from the share button. See the Save Words guide for the full flow.

You just expanded your vocabulary without putting the book down.

iCloud Sync

Start a book on your iPhone during lunch. Pick it up on your iPad on the couch. Your place, your highlights, your notes — all exactly where you left them.

ScrollWizard syncs via iCloud automatically:

Your book files
Reading progress and position
Bookmarks
Highlights and notes

No account needed. Apple handles the plumbing. Your data lives in your iCloud, not on our servers. We don't have servers.

Tip: Pull down on the library screen to trigger a manual sync if you want to make sure everything is up to date.

Reading After Dark

It's midnight. You're six chapters in. Reach for a dark palette and your eyes will thank you.

Pick Dark, Solarized Dark, or Nord from the quick settings panel for a low-light read — or build a custom dark theme with exactly the background you like. You can set a different theme per book, so your late-night novel can go dark while your daytime PDF stays light. Night reading: because "just one more chapter" always means three.

Tips & Tricks

You know the basics. Here's where it gets fun.

Footnotes stay in context. When your book has footnotes or endnotes, ScrollWizard renders them in a popup overlay. You never lose your place.

Per-book settings. Every visual setting — font, size, theme, margins, everything — can be customized per book. Switch between "This Book" and "Global" in the appearance sheet.

Continue Reading card. When you return to the library, a card at the top shows your last-read book with its progress. One tap and you're right back where you were.

Drag-select multiple books. In the library, long-press and drag across books to select multiple. Then batch-tag them, move them to a domain, or delete them.

Keyboard shortcuts. If you use a hardware keyboard with your iPad, ScrollWizard supports shortcuts for page turning, bookmarking, and navigation.

Reading statistics. Open the right-edge Stats panel to see your reading stats: today's reading time, weekly charts, how many days you've read in the last 7, annual goals, and more.

Knowledge export. Take your highlights and notes with you: open the Notes panel (right edge) and tap Export ▸ Export knowledge for a library-wide export to Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Markdown, or JSON, shared as a file through the iOS share sheet.

What's Next?

You've seen what ScrollWizard can do for free — and honestly, it's a lot. Everything above is yours, forever, no strings.

For power readers who want to go deeper, Advanced Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase — about the price of a coffee, not monthly, not yearly, just once) unlocks a few advanced reading tools:

RSVP Speed Reader — word-at-a-time reading from 100 up to 1500 WPM, with a focal guide line and session tracking (and it works on native-text PDFs too)
Split Reader — two EPUBs side by side on iPad, with sync modes for translations

Advanced Wizard Mode also unlocks Custom Fonts. Everything else in this guide is free.

Now open a book. That's it. That's the call to action. Everything else will be here when you're curious.

Happy reading.

RSVP Speed Reading

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Part of Advanced Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase)

You Read Slower Than You Need To

Let's get the uncomfortable truth out of the way: most "speed reading" claims are nonsense. Nobody is absorbing War and Peace at 2,000 words per minute. Anyone selling you that fantasy is selling snake oil.

Here's what is real: the average adult reads at 200-250 WPM. Not because that's a biological limit, but because of habits. Subvocalization. Re-reading. Losing focus mid-paragraph. Your eyes don't glide smoothly across text — they jump in quick, jerky movements called saccades, landing on a word for 200-250 milliseconds before hopping to the next fixation point. Roughly 10-15% of your reading time is spent on these jumps alone, and even more is lost to regressions — involuntary backward glances at words you already read.

RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) strips away the inefficiencies by presenting words one at a time, at a fixed point on screen. Your eyes stay still. Your attention locks in. No saccades, no regressions, no scanning.

Most people who train with RSVP settle comfortably at 350-500 WPM with good comprehension. That means finishing a 300-page novel in 3-4 hours instead of 7-8. That's not a gimmick. That's Tuesday evening with a cup of tea and a finished book.

Getting Started

Opening the Speed Reader

From any book, open the Magic Menu (wand icon) and tap Speed Reader. The RSVP reader launches full-screen, paused at a word near your current reading position. It works on EPUBs and on PDFs that carry real, selectable text (scanned-image PDFs have nothing to extract).

Take a moment to orient yourself. The current word is displayed large and centered. Below it, a faint line of text shows the rest of the current sentence for context. At the bottom are the playback controls.

Speed-Reading the Web

RSVP isn't just for books. ScrollWizard ships a Safari extension (part of Advanced Wizard Mode) that lifts the article body off any web page — stripping menus, ads, and sidebars — and hands it straight to the RSVP reader. A long read on your phone becomes a few focused minutes.

Switch it on once. Like every Safari extension, iOS keeps it off until you allow it. Open Settings → Safari → Extensions → ScrollWizard and turn it on; while you're there, let it run on every website so you're not re-granting permission page by page. You only do this once.

Then, on any article, tap the ScrollWizard icon in Safari's toolbar (it tucks under the ᴀA menu in the address bar until you pin it). The extension reads the page and shows you the title, word count, and an estimated time, with a single Speed Read button. Tap it and ScrollWizard opens straight into the RSVP reader, article already loaded.

From other apps. There's a share-sheet route too. Select text in Mail, Notes, or anywhere else, tap Share, and pick Speed Read — the selection drops into the RSVP reader the same way. (For a whole web article, reach for the Safari extension above; it does the page cleanup the share sheet can't.)

Two honest caveats. The extension reads what's actually rendered, so a hard paywall that hides the article leaves nothing to extract, and a few aggressively script-driven pages won't cooperate. And a web read is a one-off focused session — it isn't filed into your library, so enjoy it while you're there.

Your First Play

Tap the word display or the play button to start. Words begin appearing at your configured speed — 300 WPM by default.

To pause, tap again. Tap to play, tap to pause. That's the core interaction. Everything else builds on it.

Start somewhere comfortable — 250-300 WPM. This is not the time to prove anything. Let your brain calibrate. Read a chapter of something familiar. The goal of your first session isn't speed — it's comfort.

It's okay if some speeds feel too fast. That's not failure; that's the edge of your current ability. Back off, read at a comfortable pace, try again tomorrow. Your brain adapts faster than you think.

Finding Your Speed

The WPM readout sits at the center of the bottom controls, flanked by - and + buttons.

Speed Adjustment

Each tap adjusts by 25 WPM
Above 400 WPM, the step size automatically increases to 50 WPM (because the difference between 400 and 425 is subtle, but you'll feel 700 to 750)
The range spans 100 to 1500 WPM

A Practical Progression

Week 1: Read at 250-300 WPM. Get used to the word-at-a-time format. Don't worry about speed.
Week 2: Bump to 325-350 WPM. You should feel a comfortable rhythm.
Week 3+: Increase by 25 WPM every few sessions. If comprehension drops, dial it back.

After a few sessions, you'll find a point where words arrive just fast enough that your inner monologue can't keep up — and that's where RSVP gets interesting. Your brain stops sounding out each word and starts recognizing them. It feels like switching gears.

A Note on Speed Goals

A reader who sustains 350 WPM with good comprehension is doing great — roughly 40% faster than average. If you hit 500+, excellent. But there's no magic threshold. The best reading speed is the fastest one where you still enjoy and understand what you're reading.

The actual WPM readout during playback shows your real speed, accounting for pause timing at punctuation and paragraph breaks. Your actual WPM will be somewhat lower than configured, and that's by design — those pauses help comprehension.

All navigation actions automatically pause playback, so you can reorient before continuing.

Swipe left: Jump to the start of the current sentence. If you're already near the start, it jumps to the previous sentence (like the iPod "previous track" pattern).
Swipe right: Jump to the next sentence.

Missed something? Swipe left to replay. Want to skip ahead? Swipe right.

The outermost buttons on the control bar:

[⏮¶] Previous paragraph
[⏭¶] Next paragraph

Use these for bigger jumps — skipping a paragraph you've read, or backing up to a section start.

The Progress Scrubber

A thin 3px progress bar runs across the screen showing your chapter position. On pause or touch, it expands to 6px and becomes interactive. Drag to scrub through the chapter. Small tick marks indicate sentence boundaries, giving you a structural overview at a glance.

Flanking the scrubber: a paragraph count (¶ X/Y) and chapter progress (Ch X/Y).

After any navigation action, playback eases back up to speed rather than snapping straight to full pace. It starts at roughly 50% of your configured WPM and ramps continuously up to 100% over the first handful of words, after a brief extra hold on the first word. This running start gives your brain a moment to re-anchor before full-speed playback. Trust it — it's doing its job.

Highlighting Modes

Four highlighting modes help your eyes find the right fixation point faster. Switch between them in Settings (gear icon) within the RSVP reader.

ORP (Optimal Recognition Point)

The default. Eye tracking research shows readers don't fixate on word centers — they land slightly left, at the "optimal recognition point." This mode renders the ORP letter in bold/dark, surrounding letters lighter.

Subtle but powerful: your eye is drawn to the ORP automatically, reducing identification time. This is what most readers prefer at higher speeds.

Bionic Reading

The first few letters of each word are bold, the rest in regular weight. Your brain predicts the rest from the opening letters, allowing faster pattern recognition.

Many readers find Bionic highlighting especially helpful when first adapting to RSVP — the bold anchors give each word a clear visual "hook." Try it for a full chapter before deciding; it often takes 10-15 minutes to click.

Morphological

Language-aware highlighting that identifies morphemes — the meaningful building blocks within words. Prefixes, roots, and suffixes are visually distinguished. Unbelievable becomes un-believe-able.

Especially useful for academic texts, technical vocabulary, or second-language reading.

None

Clean, unstyled text. Some experienced readers prefer the simplicity at moderate speeds.

Customizing Pause Timing

Not all punctuation is equal. A comma is a brief breath; a period is a full stop; a paragraph break is a scene change.

Default Pauses

Punctuation	Default Pause
Comma, semicolon	100 ms
Period, sentence end	300 ms
Paragraph break	500 ms

Why It Matters

These pauses are critical for comprehension. Without them, text flies by as an undifferentiated stream and your brain never gets the micro-breaks it needs to process sentence structure.

Adjusting

If comprehension slips at higher speeds, try increasing the sentence-end pause before reducing WPM. Often a 50-100ms bump on period pauses is enough to restore understanding without noticeably slowing your pace.

Experienced speed readers sometimes reduce comma pauses to 50ms or 0ms while keeping sentence pauses intact. Experiment to find what works.

The Word-Length Pause Curve

Punctuation pauses handle the gaps between sentences. The word-length pause handles the words themselves. A three-letter word and a thirteen-letter word both flash for the same instant by default — but the long one carries more to take in. The pause curve gives longer words proportionally more time on screen, so the stream breathes instead of machine-gunning every word at an identical beat.

In the RSVP settings panel, find Word-length pause ("Give longer words more time on screen"). It's a draggable curve with four presets:

Off — flat timing. Every word, short or long, gets exactly the same flash. This is the old, even-beat behaviour.
Natural — a gentle slope. Long words get a modest amount of extra time.
Breathe — the default, and a more pronounced slope: long words get markedly more breathing room.
Custom — shape the curve yourself.

The curve is plotted with word length along the bottom and the pause multiplier ("Pause ×") up the side. In Custom mode, drag any of the control dots up or down to dial in exactly how much extra time each word length earns — pull the right side up for more generous long-word pauses, flatten the left for snappier short words. Touch a named preset and the curve snaps to it; touch and drag a dot and you're in Custom.

Two companions appear once the curve is on (anything but Off):

Keep average speed — on by default. Long words borrow their extra time from short ones, so your words-per-minute stays where you set it. The rhythm changes; the overall pace doesn't.
Complexity boost — a little extra time for words that pack more syllables than their length alone would predict. A dense word like "rhythm" gets a touch more room than a long-but-airy one like "remembering."

If RSVP has ever felt relentless at speed, turn the curve up before you turn the speed down. Letting the long words land often restores comprehension without costing you much pace at all.

Language Mode & L2 Reading

Language Packs

ScrollWizard ships six built-in language packs: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and a general Other (Latin-script) pack that covers everything else written in the Latin alphabet. Each pack tunes morphological analysis, ORP positioning, and punctuation rules for that language.

Auto-Detection

ScrollWizard reads language metadata from your EPUB and picks the matching pack automatically. Set it manually in settings if auto-detection gets it wrong.

L2 (Second Language) Mode

Reading in a language you're still learning? Toggle L2 Mode for three automatic adjustments:

WPM reduced by 30% — 300 WPM becomes 210 WPM
Longer pauses — extended processing time at clause and sentence boundaries
No ramp-up — steady, predictable pace after navigation

This turns RSVP from a speed tool into a comprehension tool. Language learners report that the forced sequential attention helps them stop translating in their heads and start reading directly in the target language.

L2 Mode pairs especially well with Morphological highlighting, which helps break unfamiliar words into recognizable parts. The per-book language setting means ScrollWizard remembers which books get L2 treatment automatically.

Tracking Your Progress

Session Recording

Every RSVP session is automatically logged:

Words read in the session
Average WPM (actual, accounting for pauses)
Session duration

Resume Position

Re-enter the RSVP reader for the same book and you'll see "Continue Speed Reading" — dropping you right back where you left off.

WPM History

Over time, your session history becomes proof of progress. Watching your comfortable WPM climb from 250 to 350 to 400 over weeks of practice is genuinely satisfying — and a concrete reminder that the training is working.

Seeing "Day 1: 220 WPM, Day 7: 310 WPM" is viscerally satisfying in a way no motivational quote can match. Seven sessions in a row matters more than one session at 600 WPM.

Advanced Settings

These features live in the RSVP settings panel. You don't need any of them to get started, but they let you fine-tune the experience as you develop.

Chunk Size (1-5 Words)

Display chunks of up to 5 words instead of one at a time. This mimics natural reading where your eye takes in word groups at each fixation. ScrollWizard supports randomized chunk sizes (varying between, say, 1-4 words per flash) for a more natural rhythm.

Start with single words. Once you're comfortable above 300 WPM, try chunks of 2. Some readers prefer chunks for fiction (flowing text) and single words for dense non-fiction.

Focal Guide Line

A subtle vertical 1px line running down the centre of the display, behind the word, giving your eye a fixed anchor to return to. Configurable from 0.0 (invisible) to 0.5 opacity. Most readers who use it prefer 0.1-0.15 — just enough to sense without consciously noticing.

Perceptual Span

When enabled, adjacent words appear at reduced opacity in their natural positions, providing peripheral context. Can help comprehension at higher speeds, especially for complex sentence structures.

Punctuation Repair

Cleans up inconsistent punctuation from poor EPUB conversion — missing periods, extra spaces, garbled characters — so pause timing works correctly.

Word Position

The flashing word sits a little above centre by default — comfortable for most, but not everyone holds a phone at the same angle or reads with the same neck. Drag the word up or down in the reader to move it wherever it sits easiest for you. It works whether you're paused or mid-stream, so you can nudge it without breaking your flow.

Your chosen position is remembered. It's stored on this device and isn't synced across your other devices, so each one keeps the position that suits how you hold it. To put the word back at its default spot, open the RSVP settings panel and tap Reset on the Word position row (disabled when you're already at the default).

The reader's everyday controls all live in the bottom bar so there's one place to look. Across the top row: the settings gear (left edge), previous-paragraph and next-paragraph skips flanking the large play/pause button in the middle, and the session history chart (right edge). Below them, the speed row: − and + around the WPM readout, with your live actual speed alongside during playback.

What RSVP Is Good At (and What It Isn't)

RSVP shines with: - Novels and narrative fiction — linear text that flows forward - Articles, essays, and longform journalism - Light non-fiction and memoir - Language learning texts (with L2 mode)

RSVP is less ideal for: - Dense technical material with formulas or code - Reference texts you need to scan and skip around in - Poetry (the line breaks matter) - Anything with heavy footnotes or figures

This isn't a limitation of ScrollWizard — it's a limitation of sequential presentation. For everything else, the standard reader is right there.

Tips for Effective Speed Reading

Resist subvocalization. When you read traditionally, you probably "hear" words in your head. This caps your speed at roughly speaking pace — around 250-300 WPM for most people. RSVP helps break this habit because words move faster than you can subvocalize — but it takes conscious effort at first. Let the words wash over you visually.

Comprehension is non-negotiable. If you can't summarize what you just read, you're going too fast. Drop WPM by 25-50 and rebuild. Reading fast without understanding is just watching words go by.

Use the sentence context subtitle. The faint text below the main word (40% opacity) shows the current sentence. If you lose the thread, glance down. Faster than rewinding.

Long-press for full context. Hold the display for half a second for a full-screen sentence overlay. Useful when you hit a complex sentence and need to see it whole.

Take breaks. RSVP is more demanding than traditional reading. Twenty to thirty minutes is a solid session. Two focused 20-minute sessions beat one fatigued 60-minute session.

Match mode to material. Light fiction at 400+ WPM with chunks of 3? Great. Dense philosophy at 250 WPM with morphological highlighting and extended pauses? Also great. Adjust to what you're reading.

Pay attention to haptics. The RSVP reader uses your device's haptic engine as feedback: - Light tap: Play/pause toggled - Medium tap: Sentence navigation - Heavy tap: Paragraph skip - Double heavy: Reached end of content

Chrome fades for a reason. After 2 seconds of playback, controls fade to near-transparency (20-30% opacity). Your focus should be on the words. Controls reappear instantly on pause.

The Math on Value

Speed reading courses run hundreds of dollars. Speed reading apps with less functionality charge a monthly subscription. Advanced Wizard Mode is a one-time purchase — once, forever. No subscription. No expiration.

A speed reading tool for less than the price of a coffee. You'll use it with every book you open.

And RSVP is only one of the things Advanced Wizard Mode unlocks. It also includes the Split Reader (two books side by side on iPad with paragraph-proportional sync — see the Split Reader guide) and Custom Fonts. One purchase, the whole wizard's toolkit.

Start Here

Open any book in ScrollWizard.
Tap the wand icon and select the Speed Reader.
Leave the speed at the 300 WPM default.
Read for five minutes.
That's it. You just started.

The gap between "I've always wanted to read faster" and "I just finished a book in two evenings" is smaller than you think. It's not talent. It's not a special brain. It's a tool and a little bit of practice. You've got the tool.

Happy speed reading.

Split Reader: Two Books Side by Side on iPad

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

Part of Advanced Wizard Mode (a one-time purchase)

The Problem You Already Know

You're reading a novel in French. You hit a passage that's beautiful but dense, and you want to glance at the English translation — just for a moment. So you close the book, open the other one, scrub to find the right chapter, lose your place, and by the time you get back, the magic is gone.

Or you're studying. You're deep in Chapter 12 of a textbook and need to cross-reference the glossary in the back. Tap, scroll, scroll, find the term, try to hold it in your head, tap back, scroll, scroll — where were you again?

Split Reader fixes this. Permanently.

Split Reader works with EPUB books only — when you pick a second book, PDFs are left out of the list. (The dual-pane environment is built around reflowable EPUB text.)

Two books, side by side, on one screen. A draggable divider lets you control how much space each pane gets. Drag it wherever you want, or let it snap to the sweet spots (50/50, 67/33, 33/67). It feels like it was always supposed to be there.

Opening Split Reader

Open any book and start reading.
Tap the wand icon (Magic Menu) in the toolbar.
Tap "Split Reader".
Your current book smoothly compresses to the left. A divider draws itself in the center, and the right pane opens with a library picker.
Choose a book from your library — or tap "This book, different position" to open a reference pane.

That's it. Two independent reading sessions, running at the same time.

Reading Two Different Books

Once you've selected a second book, both panes behave as full reading sessions. Each pane has its own:

Scroll position and pagination — scroll or page through each book independently
Tap zones — tap left or right within a pane to turn pages
Dictionary lookup — long-press a word in either pane
Table of contents drawer — access the TOC for whichever pane is active

Which pane is active? The active pane displays at full brightness. The inactive pane dims very slightly (to 93% opacity) — just enough to show which pane is active. Tap anywhere in the inactive pane to make it active.

When you have two different books open, the shared toolbar shows just the active pane's title and chapter:

The Great Gatsby — Ch 5

Tap into the other pane and the toolbar updates to that book. (A dual "Book A | Book B" title only shows in Reference Mode, where both panes are the same book — see below.)

Both reading positions are saved. Close Split Reader and reopen it later, and both books pick up right where you left off.

Reference Mode

Sometimes you don't need a second book — you need a second view of the same book.

Reference Mode is perfect for: - Checking a footnote without losing your place - Reading a chapter while referring to the glossary or appendix - Comparing two chapters of the same novel

To open Reference Mode:

Open Split Reader from the Magic Menu.
In the library picker, tap "This book, different position".
The right pane opens a second copy of the same book. Open its table of contents and jump to whatever section you need — a footnote, the glossary, an earlier chapter.

The toolbar makes it clear which pane is which:

Moby-Dick — Ch 3 | Reference: Ch 42

One important detail: the reference pane doesn't save its reading position. Your primary pane (left side) is your "real" reading session and always remembers where you are. The reference pane is a temporary window — close Split Reader, and it resets.

Tapping a Footnote or Link Sends It to the Reference Pane

Here's the part that makes Reference Mode click. When both panes hold the same book, tapping a footnote or an internal cross-chapter link in the left (primary) pane doesn't move the left pane at all. Instead, the right (reference) pane jumps to that target. Your reading spot on the left stays exactly where it was — you just glance right to read the note, then keep going.

No popup appears for these; the reference pane simply becomes the place where notes and references land. (A plain in-page anchor that points to the same chapter you're reading is handled in place and still scrolls the left pane locally — only footnotes and cross-chapter jumps get routed to the right.)

If you'd rather not even open Split Reader by hand first, there's a setting for that. When "Open footnotes in the reference pane" is turned on (it's off by default), tapping a footnote in a normal full-screen reading session automatically opens a reference split on that note. In that case the reference pane shows a small "Back to main text" pill at the bottom; tap it to return focus to your reading. The pill clears itself once you navigate the reference pane somewhere else on your own.

Turn reference mode on once and you'll wonder why every reading app doesn't work this way.

Sync Modes for Translations

This is where Split Reader becomes truly special for language learners.

When you have two books open — say, a French and English edition of Le Petit Prince — you can link their scrolling so they stay aligned. Tap the chain-link icon on the divider to open the sync mode picker.

Three Sync Modes

Mode	What it does	Best for
Independent (default)	No sync. Each pane scrolls on its own.	Unrelated books, casual reference
Linked Scroll	Paragraph-level sync. Scrolling one pane moves the other proportionally.	Translations, parallel texts
Linked Navigation	Chapter-level sync. Advancing a chapter in one pane advances the other.	Editions with different formatting

How Linked Scroll Works

ScrollWizard counts the paragraphs in each chapter of both books and maps them by ratio. If the French chapter has 40 paragraphs and the English has 36, it calculates the proportional position and keeps both panes aligned. It's not word-for-word perfect — translation means paragraphs won't always match one-to-one — but it's remarkably close, and far better than percentage-based sync.

Auto-Detection

When you enable a linked mode, ScrollWizard compares chapter counts, paragraph counts, and performs fuzzy matching on both tables of contents to determine how well the two books correspond. If the structure is clearly similar, sync works seamlessly. If it's very different, you'll get a heads-up that sync may be approximate.

Divider Controls (iPad)

On iPad, the divider is a powerful control surface.

Drag to Resize

Grab the divider and drag left or right. The grab target is generous (40pt wide), so it's easy to catch. Three snap points: 50/50, 67/33, and 33/67. When you drag near one, the divider gently snaps into place.

If you try to make a pane narrower than 320pt, you'll feel a rubber-band effect pulling back — preventing either pane from becoming too small to read.

Double-Tap to Cycle

Don't want to drag? Double-tap the divider to cycle through snap points: 50/50 -> 67/33 -> 33/67 -> 50/50. Each transition includes a satisfying haptic tap.

Give one book 67% when you want to focus on it, then double-tap back to 50/50.

Long-Press for Options

Long-press the divider (about half a second) for a context menu with six items:

Swap panes — moves left book to right and vice versa
Sync mode — opens the sync picker
Mirror Settings — copies the active pane's reading settings (font, theme, size, and so on) over to the other pane, so both look the same
Close Left Pane
Close Right Pane
Close Split

A note on the three "close" actions: in this first version, all three exit Split Reader entirely and drop you back to a single full-screen book. Closing one pane doesn't leave the other open on its own (yet) — it ends the split.

The same six actions are also reachable from the (...) button in the split toolbar, if you'd rather not long-press.

Keyboard Shortcuts (iPad)

If you use an external keyboard, Split Reader has a full set of shortcuts:

Shortcut	Action
Cmd + Shift + S	Toggle Split Reader on/off
Tab	Switch active pane
Cmd + [	Resize to 67/33 (left pane larger)
Cmd + ]	Resize to 33/67 (right pane larger)
Cmd + \	Reset to 50/50
Cmd + Shift + X	Swap panes
Cmd + W	Close split

Tab to switch panes becomes second nature within minutes. Learn that and Cmd+Shift+S and you're covered for 90% of use cases.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Split Reader

Start with 50/50 and adjust. The default even split works well for most use cases. If one book has denser text, give it more space with a double-tap on the divider.

Use Reference Mode for non-fiction. Open a reference pane to the index or glossary. It saves an enormous amount of back-and-forth, and the reference pane won't interfere with your bookmarks.

Try Linked Scroll with translations before committing. Open both books, enable Linked Scroll, and page through a chapter. If sync feels off, try Linked Navigation — chapter-level sync is less precise but more reliable across differently formatted editions.

Great pairings to try:

A novel in your target language + the same novel in your native language (Linked Scroll)
A textbook chapter + a separate EPUB of its source readings
A primary source + a commentary or study guide
Poetry in the original language + a literal translation
A textbook + a separate EPUB of supplementary readings

Exiting Split Reader

Several ways to close — use whichever feels natural: - "Unsplit" button in the toolbar (two inward arrows) - Long-press the divider > "Close split" - Drag the divider all the way to the screen edge - Cmd + W on a keyboard

Your reading position in both books is saved (except the reference pane).

On the Subject of Price

Split Reader is part of Advanced Wizard Mode. Not a subscription. Not per month. Not per book. A single one-time purchase — once, forever, yours.

Split Reader gives you a genuine dual-pane reading environment with three sync modes, reference mode, gesture controls, and keyboard shortcuts. A professional-grade tool at an indie-app price. No subscription growing underneath it.

The other half of Advanced Wizard Mode is the RSVP Speed Reader — word-at-a-time presentation at 100-1500 WPM. Per-pane typography follows from the same per-book settings as solo reading — see Settings and Customization.

Split Reader. Two books. One screen. Once you've read this way, the old way feels like reading with one eye closed.

Happy reading — times two.

Track Your Reading

2026-04-04T00:00:00+02:00

You've been reading more than you think. ScrollWizard tracks your time automatically — no timers to start, no logs to fill in. Open the Stats panel — swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or tap the right-edge affordance) to slide open the panel stack, then choose Stats — and there it is: a quiet record of every session and every book you've finished. Not a report card. A mirror.

Everything here — time tracking, goals, charts, completion history, reminders — is free. No premium analytics tier, no paywall. Your reading data is yours from day one.

How Tracking Works

You don't need to do anything. ScrollWizard creates a reading session the moment you open a book and updates it when you close the reader. Each session records your start time, end time, pages read, chapters covered, and progress percentage.

If the app force-closes mid-session (battery dies, iOS reclaims memory), your start time is preserved and the end time defaults to the moment the session was interrupted. No reading time is lost.

Sessions are bucketed by the day they started, not ended. A late-night session that begins at 11:45 PM counts toward that day, even if you read past midnight. The rules are consistent and predictable.

Five minutes with a book counts. It always counted.

The Stats Panel

Your reading life at a glance — time spent today, how many of the last seven days you've read, and a chart that shows patterns you didn't know you had. There's no separate "Statistics" screen; it all lives in this one panel.

To open it, swipe in from the right edge of the screen (or tap the right-edge affordance) to slide open the panel stack, then choose Stats.

The Stats panel assembles itself as you read. Before your first session it simply says "Nothing to report yet — your reading stats will appear once you start a book." After that, the cards fill in. No zeroes staring at you, no empty charts making you feel guilty. Features surface as they become relevant.

Looking for the book you most recently had open? That's the Continue Reading card on the Library screen — a hero card with cover, title, and a progress bar. Tap it to jump straight back into the reader.

The Three Summary Cards

Across the top, three at-a-glance cards:

Card	Shows
Books Read	Total completed books (all time)
In Progress	Books you've started but not finished
Last 7 days	How many of the last seven days you read, as X/7

That last card is the gentle heartbeat of the panel. Read on five of the last seven days and it shows 5/7 — a rolling count that always includes today and the six days before it. No streaks to break, no flame to keep alive: miss a day and the number just reflects the window. Read again and it ticks back up. A pattern, not a promise.

Today's Stats

A daily-goal card with:

Today's reading time — large, bold, hard to miss
Goal ring / progress bar — visible only if you've set a daily goal. Green with a checkmark when complete, accent-colored while in progress.

With no daily goal set, this slot still earns its space with a quiet three-line summary: how many books you're currently reading, how many of the last seven days you read, and how many you've finished this year.

Reading Time

A Reading Time section with a segmented control:

Segment	Time Range
Today	Current calendar day
This Week	Monday through Sunday
This Month	Current calendar month
All Time	Every session since you started

Tap a segment and the time display updates. The number comes from your actual reading sessions — no approximations.

Daily Activity Chart (7-Day and 30-Day)

Seven bars. Seven days. Sometimes the story they tell is more interesting than the numbers themselves.

A bar chart of daily reading time, with a toggle for a 7-day or 30-day window. Bars use your theme's accent color and auto-scale. Tap any bar for a tooltip with the exact time ("Apr 2: 1h 15m"). Days with no reading show as small dots rather than invisible gaps — you can see the shape of your week at a glance.

The chart doesn't judge your Tuesday. Neither do we.

Reading the chart:

Y-axis: Auto-scaled, formatted as "1h" or "30m" depending on volume. Clean divisions — no awkward labels.
X-axis: Two-letter day abbreviations.
Bars: Rounded rectangles in accent color. Tap for a tooltip with exact time.
Empty days: Small dots at low opacity. The chart never looks completely blank.

The 30-day window: bars become thinner, but the interaction is the same. Useful for spotting weekly rhythms (weekends vs. weekdays) and tracking consistency over a longer window. Missing days are filled with zero-duration entries for a complete, unbroken timeline.

Setting Goals

A daily goal is a gentle nudge, not a contract. All goals are optional, off by default, and configurable from Settings > Reading Goals.

Daily Page Goal

Pick a preset — Off, 10, 20, 30, 50, or 75 pages per day — or tap Custom to dial in your own value.

When real page counts are available, ScrollWizard uses them. Otherwise — and EPUBs don't have fixed page numbers — it estimates pages from your reading time at roughly 0.75 minute per page (about 250 words a minute over a typical page). Think of it as a "read for about this long" proxy rather than an exact page tally.

Daily Time Goal

Pick a preset — Off, 15, 20, 30, 45, or 60 minutes per day — or tap Custom for any value up to 180 minutes.

Time goals use your actual reading duration — no estimation. Set 30 minutes, read 30 minutes, done.

One Goal, Not Two

Page and time goals are mutually exclusive — setting one clears the other. This keeps the panel clean: one progress measure, one thing to aim for.

If you're new to reading goals, start with 15 or 30 minutes. It's concrete, measurable, and doesn't depend on page-count estimation. The best daily goal is the one you'll actually hit tomorrow.

You can change your goal at any time — mid-week, mid-day, mid-chapter. Lowering it isn't failure. It's calibration. A goal you consistently hit does more for your habit than an aspirational number you consistently miss.

Goal Progress Ring

When a daily goal is active, a progress ring fills in the Stats panel as you read. Before completion: accent color. Complete: green with a checkmark. Simple, satisfying, done.

Annual Book Goal

Separate from daily goals. Choose how many books you want to finish this year from the preset chips — 12, 24, 36, or 52 — or tap Custom for your own number (up to 150).

A book counts as "read" when you reach 100% progress. The card shows a linear progress bar and "X of Y books."

Pace projection: ScrollWizard calculates your projected year-end total. When ahead of pace, the card adds "On pace for Z books this year." When behind pace, nothing extra — just the count and bar. Encouragement without pressure.

Setting the goal to 0 disables it entirely.

You don't have to set a daily goal or an annual target. The Stats panel works fine without them. Time tracking and charts run regardless. Goals are there when you want structure, invisible when you don't.

Book Completion

Finishing a book deserves a moment. ScrollWizard gives you a record.

A book is "completed" when your reading progress reaches 100%. The Stats panel includes a Recently Finished section: a vertical list of completed books with checkmark icons and dates.

If you haven't finished any books yet, a gentle "No books finished yet" message appears. No countdown, no target. It's a record, not a leaderboard.

Reading Reminders

A notification at the time you choose — because the hardest part of reading is remembering to start.

Settings > Reading Goals > toggle Reading Reminder on.
Tap Reminder Time to set the hour (default: 8:00 PM).
You'll get a daily local notification. Tap to open ScrollWizard.

No internet needed, no server involved. Turn off the toggle and notifications stop immediately.

Tips & Tricks

Stats appear gradually. The activity chart shows up after your first session. The annual goal card appears when you set a goal. Nothing is hidden — it just waits until it has something to say.

The last-7-days count is forgiving. It's a rolling window, not a streak. Miss a day and there's nothing to "break" — the number simply reflects how many of the last seven days you read, and it climbs again the next time you open a book.

Reading time is session time. ScrollWizard measures from opening a book to closing the reader. If you leave it open while making dinner, that counts. Close the reader when you stop for the most accurate stats.

Pages-read prefers the real count. When ScrollWizard knows a book's page count it tracks pages directly; otherwise it estimates from time at about 0.75 minute per page. Either way, page goals are a "read for about this long" proxy, not an exact tally.

iCloud syncs sessions. Read on your iPhone during lunch and your iPad in the evening — both sessions appear in your statistics everywhere.

Everyone's first week looks sparse. That's not a reflection of you as a reader. Give it two weeks. The charts fill in, the patterns emerge, and the numbers start to feel like yours.

Back up your data. Settings > Data Management > Export All Data creates a full backup of everything, including all reading sessions and statistics.

What's Next

Reading is the point. The statistics are just a mirror — a way to see the habit you're already building, reflected back in a form that's occasionally surprising and almost always encouraging.

Highlighting passages as you read? The Annotations & Highlights Guide covers colors, notes, bookmarks, and export.
Saving words from your reading? The Save Words guide covers the dictionary, your saved-word list, and export.
Moving knowledge into your workflow? The Export Guide covers Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, and more.
New to ScrollWizard? The Getting Started Guide covers the basics.

A handful of short sessions across the week matters more than one heroic marathon. Open a book tonight. Happy reading.

~*~ ScrollWizard ~*~

Back up and restore your library

Where this lives

Make a backup

What's inside, and what's left out

The one thing that only lives in your backup

Bring a backup back

Before you wipe or reinstall

A related, separate thing: Export Annotations

Keyboard shortcuts

Reader

Split Reader

Tips

What's next

Save Words & Look Them Up in a Built-In Dictionary

Looking Up a Word

What the Popup Shows

Saving Words

Browsing Your Saved Words

Exporting Your Saved Words

Anki CSV (.txt)

TSV (.tsv)

JSON (.json)

Dictionary Settings

Custom Dictionaries

Local JSON Dictionaries

Custom Web Dictionaries

Tips & Tricks

What's Next

FAQ

Does ScrollWizard scroll?

Is it free?

What does Advanced Wizard Mode add?

What file formats can I read?

Does it work offline?

Where do my books live?

Can I export my highlights and notes?

Library Management

Your Library at a Glance

Sorting

Domains

Creating a Domain

Color-Coding

Filtering by Domain

Assigning Books to Domains

Managing Domains

How Many Domains?

Tags

Adding Tags to a Book

Batch Tagging

Filtering by Tags

Managing Tags

Smart Collections

Built-in Presets

Creating Custom Smart Collections

Search

Library Search (Title and Author)

Full-Text Search (Inside Books)

Selection Mode and Batch Operations

Entering Selection Mode

Selecting Books

Batch Actions

Exiting Selection Mode

The Book Detail Sheet

Import and Duplicate Detection

The Sidebar

Organization Strategies

The Minimalist

The Two-Domain Split

The Tagger

The Curator

The One Rule

Tips & Tricks

What's Next

Reading PDFs on iPhone & iPad

Importing PDFs

From the Library

From Other Apps

The PDF Reading Experience

Pinch to Zoom

~~ ScrollWizard ~~