INTRODUCTION TO POLYFOILS

Did you start Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time,' enjoy the beginning, but stopped somewhere in Chapter 3? Thomas Picketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century' may be the book readers penetrate least. Most close it after the introduction and 1/2 a chapter. We're habituated to books that tell linear stories, one chapter's consequence the next chapter's cause. Since reality's causes and consequances interweave and tangle, and nonfiction reflects reality, non-fiction isn't really linear.

Have you ever written an article, paper, book, or report, and found you wrote more than could possibly fit? Most journalists, scholars, lawyers, and scientists experience this. They may rely on editors to decide what to keep and what to cut. More often they guess, and compare theirs to similar work. But published writers write for an audience, not an individual. Audiences contain different people, with different needs. There is no one right version.

Polyfoils begin with pages one after the other, like any document. Being digital, writers and readers usually scroll vertically. To the sides, Polyfoil panels can egress - departing from a

core page - either in flat (orthogonal) view, or tilted back (precessed). They can also be almost hidden, if the page is really a cube's surface. Specialized polyfoils can fan out, cross behind pages, or appear side by side to each other.

Now you can read Hawking, Picketty, and other great nonfiction authors as they were written, with central ideas uppermost in the mind of the evidence hunter. An entire book can be as long (or short) as its introduction. As the writer cruises through placing each puzzle piece into overall position, Polyfoil panels to the side contain chapters of evidence. As Picketty

describes changing economic models, he pauses to introduce each era, which he later elaborates on in a chapter. Now the elaboration immediately egresses as a Polyfoil. The reader spins the page to follow the oP (a cyclical Polyfoil sequence.) She can jump back to the core at will. Then, when following a later oP's chapter, Picketty's team, or other scholars and students, can include bridge sequences between chapters. Flattened out, this almost resembles a crossword puzzle.

Readers construct their own version, following evidence as they wish, completing interconnections chosen.

They never lose touch with the overarching ideas, collected in the core, the original introduction.

Writers can use Polyfoils as a template, shooting off tangents, wrapping them back around core pages. As they cut material, they need not paste it akwardly. Instead they deposit it on a Polyfoil. Ideas spread out from a common core page, to show alternative, supporting, or contradictory concepts. A writer's first draft may seem long, but instead of just cutting it, she provides a short-cut route. Math equations can be hidden on Polyfoils, as can math explanations that might insult the intelligence of

specialists. Writers put maps and diagrams, photographs and restricted material, anything that's not part of the basic core sequence, on suitable Polyfoils. Articles and books become more more than one sequence; they contain many.

Polyfoil shapes and sequence patterns express the architecture of ideas. oPs that rotate around the core reinforce it. Sequences off to the side which bifurcate further present complexity. Parralel sequences can be used for dual explanations.

Do you read digital books on iPads or Kindles? If so, you may notice they

rarely have footnotes, only endnotes. I learned this reading Al Franken's "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them."1 Some of his liars claim they use footnotes, when they use endnotes. These are very different things. Readers ignore endnotes, but footnotes are easy to refer to. I looked into books that use endnotes and found that most digital ones do. All that are "reflowable," which means that when you zoom in or out, making the text larger or smaller, the book repaginates. Stuff gets pushed down to later pages, or pulled closer. Footnotes can't stomach this roller-

1 This is a hyperlink footnote

coaster, as they bump against each other, or get separated from the text they refer to.

This has it's greatest impact on legal texts, which use footnotes for their most important stuff. Some devote more space to footnotes than ordinary text. So legal journals aren't reflowable if published digitally, and aren't accessible on tablet reading platforms. All serious stuff, and even funny material like Franken's, are limited by the endnote factor. You can't check up the text's references in real time.

Polyfoils permit, not footnotes, but armnotes. A default Polyfoil display

has panels to the core's side, in partial view, precessed so that extra content is visible (at an angle.) These are often empty. A writer anchors an armnote to a sentence in the core, and saves it to the side panel. It's readable at an angle. Interested readers click on it, to open an orthogonal surface with the armnote. When the digital document reflows, the armnote reflows alongside, anchored to the core text. Armnotes are more accessible than footnotes, since they remain on the eye plane of the sentence anchor.

This just brushes Polyfoil potential. Slide sequences on this website explain, with illustrations, many more.

They also show how Polyfoil software constructs these new sequences. An important issue is readability. The typical computer generated 3D surface, with text on it, requires heavy processing, and is uncomfortable to read. I thoroughly deconstructed software functions and human optical processing. Then I rebuilt text-bearing panel rotations and other transforms. Reading Polyfoils is comfortable, compelling, nimble, responsive, and fast.

A Polyfoil version of this introduction is rendered next. (the first page only.) As you scroll, side panels appear to rotate into view.

Brian Coyle