This is a reader for classical texts that runs entirely on your device: after the first visit it needs no internet at all. Tap any heading below to open that topic — in the body of a text every heading starts closed and opens with one tap.
Install the app on your device
This site is the app: installing means getting its own icon (the Greek letter Φ) and opening full screen, without looking like a browser. Once installed, it works offline.
On iPhone and iPad
Only Safari installs apps of this kind (Apple's rule — Chrome on iPhone cannot).
1. Open this address in Safari
2. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow, at the bottom)
3. Scroll the list and tap "Add to Home Screen"
4. Confirm the name and tap Add
On Android
1. Open this address in Chrome
2. Tap the ⋮ menu (three dots, top corner)
3. Tap "Install app" or "Add to home screen"
4. Confirm
On some devices Chrome offers the install in a banner at the bottom — just accept it.
On a computer
1. Open this address in Chrome or Edge
2. On the right of the address bar an install icon appears (a monitor with an arrow, or "⊕")
3. Click it and confirm
The app becomes its own window, with a shortcut in the start menu / desktop.
How to use the reader
Reading
Tap any heading to open or close that section. Headings further left are the larger chapters; the further right, the deeper in the structure of the text.
Footnote marks (small numbers in the text) open the note right there, in a box — tap it, then "Back to the text". Holding your finger on the mark takes you to the full list of notes.
Names underlined with dots are figures: one tap opens a card with the entry (like Wikipedia); holding your finger opens the entry as a full page — the ← arrow returns to where you were.
Text size
Use the + and − buttons at the top, or pinch with two fingers over the text. The text grows and reflows to the width of the screen without losing the point where you were reading. There is no timid limit: one word per screen is a valid size.
Colours and contrast
In the contents (Ξ) tap APPEARANCE and choose the scheme that rests your eyes: sepia, parchment, black on white, white on black, yellow on black, green on black, or shades of blue. The choice is saved on the device.
Searching
Tap the magnifier and type:
a word — the app sweeps the whole book, even with sections closed, ignoring accents ("misericordia" finds "misericórdia");
a reference — Gn 1:1, Ps 23:1, 1Cor 13:4 in the Bible; 5.1 in the Encheiridion. Enter jumps straight to the address. Each work uses its own abbreviation, shown on its details card.
Contents and library
The Ξ button (Greek xi) opens the book's contents, with its chapters and actions. The Φ button (Greek phi, the app's mark) opens the library, with the folder structure and a search by title, author or folder.
The workbench: keeping the panels open
On a wide screen — a computer, or a tablet held sideways — the two panels stop
covering the text and sit beside it, like a workbench.
Open a panel and tap the pin at its top. It stays put: you read and
navigate at the same time, without opening and closing at every jump. Tapping
the pin again releases the panel.
The pin only appears where there is real room. From about 800 pixels wide,
one panel fits beside the text; from 1120, both do — library on one
side, contents on the other. Between those two numbers, pinning one releases
the other on its own: two panels in a narrow window would leave the reading
column too thin to serve.
Shrink the window and the panels go back to being ordinary overlays, closed by
tapping outside. Nothing is left stranded off screen.
Getting around with the keyboard
If you do not use a mouse, there are two movements, and the difference between them is what makes the screen navigable:
Tab moves within a region, from one control to the next. Shift+Tab goes back.
F6 moves between regions: top bar, text, library, contents. Shift+F6 goes the other way.
Without F6, getting from the text to a setting would mean crossing everything in between. With it, it is one key.
The first tab stop on the page is Skip to the text, which jumps the whole bar. Esc closes any panel or dialog and returns focus to the button that opened it.
Listening to the text
The 🔊 button at the bottom opens the voice reader: Listen reads aloud what is open on screen, starting from where you stopped, highlighting the spoken paragraph. You can pause, resume, stop, choose the voice (the ones on your device) and adjust the speed. It all happens on the device — it works offline with the installed voices.
The voice changes by itself according to the language of each passage: Greek is read with a Greek voice, Hebrew with a Hebrew voice, English with an English voice. When the right voice is missing from the device, the app says so and uses the closest one — Latin, which no system has, comes out in Italian.
Marking the language of a line
Sometimes the app has no way to guess: a two-word line, a stray verse, an interlinear alternating Portuguese and English line by line. In those cases you write the language at the end of the line, with the same ^ used for anchors — In the beginning was the Word. ^eng makes that line come out in an English voice.
The codes are ^por, ^eng, ^lat, ^grc, ^heb and ^rus. The mark does not appear in the reading, and what is written always beats what the app would guess. A line can carry both — address and language, in this order: Text. ^gn-1-1 ^eng. Any other anchor remains just an address, as always.
Your own texts
In the library (Φ) there are two buttons:
ADD — brings .md or .txt files from your device into the app.
NEW — opens a blank sheet to type or paste anything: a conversation, an article, a note. Once saved, it becomes reading with everything the app offers — zoom, themes, collapsible headings, search.
And three ways that skip the button entirely:
Drag the file onto the app window, anywhere on it.
On a computer, right-click the file → Open with → Pedra Angular, or drag it onto the app's icon.
Share the file with the app from the system menu (Android and Windows; the iPhone offers this to no browser-installed app).
A single file dropped on its own opens on screen to be read. Several at once go quietly into the folder, so none of them decides for you which to open.
Your texts live in the "My files" folder, on your device only (they are never uploaded anywhere), work offline, and can be edited later: open the text, tap Ξ and then EDIT. Books from the library cannot be edited — the collection is untouchable.
Find and replace
With the editor open, Ctrl+F opens find and Ctrl+H opens find and
replace. As you type, the app shows how many matches there are and which one
you are on.
Enter goes to the next, Shift+Enter to the previous, Esc closes and
returns the cursor to the text. The search ignores case: looking for
inclusion finds Inclusion and INCLUSION.
Two things worth knowing. The replacement field takes the text literally —
typing R$ 10 puts R$ 10, with no special meaning for the dollar sign. And
Replace all counts as a single edit: one Ctrl+Z undoes every
replacement at once.
Copying
In the contents (Ξ), COPY copies the whole file, byte for byte — front matter, anchors and all. It is the faithful copy, meant for you to paste into an editor, work on it, and return the file to its folder.
In the ⋯ menu there is the passage copy, with two options: visible only, which ignores closed sections and comes out clean of markup, and everything, which comes out as it is in the file.
About this project
This reader is part of the Pedra Angular project: a corpus of classical texts — ancient and modern philosophy, Scripture — preserved in plain text, made to last and to be read by anyone, on any device, with any eyesight.
The collection is polyglot: each work stays in the language it was written or translated into, and the app never translates it on the fly. Only the interface follows your device's language.
The embedded books are in the public domain or translated by the project itself. The app asks for no account, shows no advertising and tracks no one; it only counts visits, anonymously and without cookies. It is just you and the text.
Ὁ Διαφορεύς παρῆν.