paragraph width in firefox

February 8, 2008 4:50 AM

Is there a plugin/extension/script for Firefox that automatically resizes text columns to make them a comfortable width to read?

I spend a lot of time reading large blocks of text on the web, and I find myself constantly resizing the browser window (firefox) in order to make a particular block of text a comfortable reading width (the oft-quoted 80 characters). Does anyone know of an extension or greasemonkey script that will do this automatically, as I switch between tabs?

posted by primer_dimer to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Ctrl-Shift-S ?
posted by bryanjbusch at 5:25 AM on February 8

Although it is not automatic, the Aardvark plug-in (http://karmatics.com/aardvark/) is very helpful for manually resizing and de-junkifying web pages. I use it quite a bit, especially for web pages that I want to print out. There is a firefox plug-in version as well as a browser-agnostic javascript bookmarklet version. You may find it useful.
posted by bmosher at 7:56 AM on February 8

My pet peeve is text that runs from the left side of the browser window to the right with no margins. I found a bookmarklet and hacked it a little to change the page's style to 12% left/right margins and increased the space between lines. Make a dummy bookmark and paste this into the location field (there are no line breaks):

javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { margin-left:12%; margin-right:12%; line-height: 1.5 }';if(document.createStyleSheet) {document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS); } })()

And thanks for that tip, design8r!
posted by davcoo at 10:55 AM on February 8