Peritext Reading Tools

Peritext Reading Tools puts the reader front and center. A book’s peritext is what surrounds the text inside its covers: the title, the contents, the notes. This plugin does that for a long post. It adds a few small blocks for people who write long texts and want them read, without turning the page into a dashboard.

• Reading time: “6 min read”, placed automatically under the post title (or after the post date).
• Listen: a button that reads the post aloud with the browser’s own voice. Nothing is sent anywhere; if the browser has no speech engine, the button hides itself.
• Table of contents: a linked outline of the post’s headings, with the section in view highlighted.
• Related essays: up to three other posts that share the most tags with the current one.
• Tagged stories and the Tagged page template: give a page one or more tags and it shows the posts with those tags as cards, with an optional “Highlighted” row (posts that also carry the tag “highlighted”). If a post has a custom field amazon_url, its card also gets a “Read on Amazon” link.

Placed for you, yours to move

The blocks are placed for you with block hooks (WordPress 6.4 and later), on a single post in a block theme:

• In a theme without a reading rail (Twenty Twenty-Five, Twenty Twenty-Four and most others): reading time and Listen directly under the post title, the table of contents (folded, “On this page”, only when the post has two or more headings) above the text, and related essays below it. If the template already shows a post date, reading time and Listen go after the date instead of under the title, never both.
• In a theme with a reading rail, a Group block with the CSS class essay-tools-rail: the table of contents and related essays go into the rail. The reading time also goes at the end of a group with the class essay-tools-card.

Anything you place by hand in a template is not doubled. You can remove or move any of them in the Site Editor, and add the blocks anywhere in a template or post.

Under Settings > Reading Tools you can switch each tool off: reading time, Listen, table of contents, related essays. A switched-off tool is no longer placed automatically, in any theme. Blocks you add yourself always show.

Works with any block theme

The styles follow the colors and fonts of the active theme, including dark modes that change the text color, so the tools fit any block theme.

A theme can give the tools a reading rail beside the text: a Group block with the class essay-tools-rail. There the table of contents and related essays sit out of the reader’s way, and fold into one line on a phone. The author’s own theme, Lexis, is built that way.

Privacy

The plugin makes no external requests, sets no cookies and stores nothing. Listen uses the speech engine of the visitor’s own browser.