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Old 04-23-2016, 06:27 PM   #1
SteveEisenberg
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Posts: 7,425
Karma: 43514536
Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: near Philadelphia USA
Device: Kindle Kids Edition, Fire HD 10 (11th generation)
Possible Developer Project: Font Size Control Similar to Defunct Google gwt Mobilizer

Until about four months ago, I was a fairly heavy user of http://www.readingthenet.com/, an interface that created simplified, fast loading, large font versions of text-heavy web sites, optimized for the WiFi/3G browser found in early Kindle models. I got the feeling that not a whole lot of people were as satisfied with it as I was (maybe no one!), but I liked it, mostly for international news access, but also for weather.

About four months ago Google took down the http://www.google.com/gwt/x site which www.readingthenet.com called, wrecking the latter. As I mentioned in a February Links Every Kindle Owner Should Have post, there are several remaining mobilizers (web pages simplifying other sites), but there is no obvious-to-me way to make them default to a desired font size. While you can bring up a page, and then change the font size, this takes so long as to make the process impractical except in a dire emergency. What is needed is something that, given the right kind of web site, keeps the highly simplified, text-only, large font, format the same every time you go to the bookmark, and maintains it as you follow links.

Can anyone say whether it should be possible to build a successor to www.readingthenet.com, or suggest another way to achieve similar results? If easy, perhaps someone here would like to take a stab at it. If difficult, I guess I am out of luck. If the difficulty is in-between, who knows, maybe I could do it with some hints as to where to go and what to learn.

I should mention that I'm a (in my mind, anyway) competent IBM COBOL batch and VB.NET Windows forms developer without web expertise. Of course, I don't expect people here to teach me everything that I've missed professionally over the last twenty years :-)

Thanks for all ideas.
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