An Idea for a Novel Reading Feature

When reading novels or biographies like Steve Jobs, it’s easy to lose track of who’s who, especially with translated foreign names that are hard to remember.

So I came up with a feature: “hair dye.”

Feature Description

Use different colors to highlight different names to help memorize characters. Each character’s color should be fixed from the start, and everyone should have a unique color.

For example: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak

You can also use different background colors to achieve the same effect.

Inspiration

Japanese anime. As someone who has trouble recognizing faces, I often can’t tell characters apart-unless I rely on clothes or colors. Many series assign different hair colors to each character to distinguish them. That separation is very effective.

Why I Thought of This

While reading Steve Jobs, I kept flipping back to the character list. Aside from the main characters, I could barely remember anyone. Translated names are just too hard to memorize.

So I thought about how to solve this before going to bed.

That’s how this feature idea came out.

I haven’t written the code part.

Possible Implementation

There are quite a few algorithms that can detect names in text.

Extract each name, define a color for each character from the start, and keep it consistent throughout the article.

Possible Issues

A character might appear with a full name, a shortened name, or even a nickname. That may require users to distinguish, or we can boldly hope for future AI.