Scroll

A scroll is a roll of parchment, papyrus, or paper which has been written upon. They were used in ancient civilizations before the codex or bound book was invented in the first century. The linear access of the scroll meant that it was easy to confuse the scribes; for example, there are versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead with multiple, repeated sections.

Scrolls are still used today in some religious contexts; in Jewish and many other cultures, a scroll is read with one roll to the left and one roll to the right, and with columns of text running from top to bottom. Quality control of a Jewish Torah is maintained by counting the number of characters, and disposing of the faulty versions, before they can be used.

Some other cultures use scrolls with one roll at the top and one at the bottom, without any obvious division of the text into columns. In some scroll-using cultures painted illustrations ran above the columns of text, either in a continuous band or broken into scenes above either a single or double-column of text. Typically, each end of a scroll is attached to a rod or baton for support and to protect from damage during storage and use.

See also: parchment, paleography.

computer graphics, the verb to scroll denotes the act of sliding a horizontal or vertical presentation of contents (text, drawing or image) across the screen or display window – often employed to show long reams of information that don't fit within the available space for display. Scrolling may be performed by software running on a computer's CPU, or it may be done by performing some operation on a dedicated 2D computer graphics chip.

The verb "to scroll" , is derived from the way in which people read scrolls. Visually the act is fairly similar.

On the home computer demo scene of the 1980s, as well as the period's computer and video games, scrolling was often an integral feature.

For reading text, a text (column) wider than fits on the screen, requiring horizontal scrolling, is impractical and therefore avoided. A page higher than fits on the screen is more common and not problematic; it requires vertical scrolling to see all of it.

In a WIMP style GUI, scrolling is done with the help of a scrollbar or using keyboard shortcuts, (often the arrow keys). Scrolling is often a key feature in TUI and CLI style interfaces, though some older computer terminals used page-mode instead. Modern mice may also have a scroll wheel.

See also: text crawl