Readability - Making A Website Easier to Read

[Gideon]

Some of you may know about this little bookmarklet, but I thought I'd share it as I found it useful today putting some articles I've been wanting to read on my Kindle.

The service is called Readability and it works with all the major browsers. You simply go to the website, create your settings, and it makes a custom bookmarklet for you. When you get to a website you want to print, or put on your eReader (or even email to yourself) you simply click the bookmarklet and it renders the text in a clean, easy to read format (most of the time!)



After you set them up, you go to a busy website.... like this atrocious number here:



And you click the button and...



And that's it. You can print it, email it, save it as a PDF (if you can do that). Hope this helps.

[jgray]

I tried Readability it works well. I am using a similar Firefox plugin called TidyRead. The latest version seems to work well with the NoScript plugin.

[zelda_pinwheel]

nice tips, thank you. i will definitely take a look at readability and also tidyread.

[jimbob101]

Looks Great.

I think i'll be using this a lot as i often find short stories online that i have to convert to reader to get them looking right

thanks again.

[junkyardwillie]

Cool site just added the bookmark

[emellaich]

Originally Posted by jimbob101

Looks Great.

I think i'll be using this a lot as i often find short stories online that i have to convert to reader to get them looking right

thanks again.

One more tip for you, if you are a Firefox user. There is an extension called "Nuke Everything Enhanced". It lets you highlight something on a web page and "hide" it.

For stories, you can highlight the story itself and choose to hide everything that is NOT highlighted. Then when you save or print it it only retains the stuff you choose. It doesn't reformat the page, just hides the stuff you don't want.

You can use it to isolate stories from the background, I've also used it on maps/directions when I want to hide the extra stuff so that it will fit on one the page.

[Abelturd]

Thanks, it's great for exporting web pages for later reading on a liseuse.
I just tested it with wikipedia, it does a nice job.

[netseeker]

Thank you Gideon. I didn't know that bookmarklet. It does really a good job.

[maidavale]

Readability is amazing, I've been using it for few weeks now. Allow me to offer other "readability" tips (that pertains to LCD monitors, especially concerning eye strains)as well:

-Readability alternative - Readable-app - I prefer Readability because of its text flow formatting (i.e. when you resize your browser horizontally, the text doesn't overflow and you don't get a horizontal scroll bar... btw in general, when it comes to this issue, I find Chrome to be superior than other browsers including Firefox). Guess I like small-columned paragraphs with wide, wide margins. However, Readable-app offers more styling options that may suit your liking.

-Fonts - A general rule is Sans-serif fonts such as Verdana for electronic displays

-Colours - Personally, I find light-coloured text on dark background easier to read (esp. in a low-light setting). You may relate if you find terminal screens with black background with green/white texts easier on your eyes. For my browser, I use the same teal-like colour used in sites such as Ask MetaFilter for background and a very light-green hue for texts (the key is to get a nice contrast). Inverting colours on your OS is another solution

• Windows - "Alt" + "Shift" + "PrtScn" (although some people might not like this very much b/c it changes GUI/theme for your Windows)

• OS X - "Ctrl" + "Option" + "Apple" + 8

• Linux - ?

-Larger-sized fonts for your browser... obviously


While I assume many people here already know all these given the nature of this forum, I certainly hope the info. comes across as new for others. Cheers.