Quick Layout Export?

December 31, 2005 12:01 PM

Often when reading an article I notice that it sits in a slim column which doesn't seem to change width when I maximize the browser window.

The article column is often so slim that it's text has to go beyond the bottom of the screen, causing you to scroll. This is absurd when I have roughly 8x the room on either side of my wide format monitor. Is there any way to quickly click on an article to cause it to open up in a pre-formatted CSS which would be more appropriate for reading? Something barebones, which strips the content out and places it in something easier on the eyes? Just looking for a more optimal reading layout really. Running Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP.

posted by parallax7d to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

I wish there were somthing to do the opposite. Lines that are less than 70 characters long are easiest to read.

Get the Web Developer extension for Firefox, and on the CSS drop down pick "Display CSS Media By Type > Print". Then you can have the text fill the whole screen.
posted by andrewzipp at 12:10 PM on December 31, 2005

Whenever I want to "flatten" something out, I use IYHY.com which is actually designed for mobile phones but works great on oter sites, including MetaTalk and MetaFilter.
posted by crazyray at 12:33 PM on December 31, 2005

Well, since you already have Firefox, you might grab the zap style sheets bookmarklet. Kills stylesheets dead, leaves the content intact.
posted by mdevore at 12:51 PM on December 31, 2005

Response by poster: To clarify, I guess I am looking for something that can export the content of a specific CSS, and display it in a predefined format.

This way you can specify the width of the article (let's say andrewzipp's 70 character suggestion), the backround color (or even an image), the font type and size etc...
posted by parallax7d at 1:20 PM on December 31, 2005

This sounds like a job for GreaseMonkey:

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML ("user scripts") to any web page to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a web page's style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a web page's design or interaction.

Unfortunately, I've not jumped in deep enough to know the inner workings of the Monkey to create something so useful for you.

Basically, it lets you hax0r (so to speak) the way a page is displayed or handled by Firefox after it's been rendered and received, regardless of the markup or styling instructions present in the page's source.
posted by disillusioned at 2:43 PM on December 31, 2005

Basically, if you're talking about doing this for a specific site, then you have many options: write a greasemonkey script, write a user-stylesheet, etc. But you shouldn't expect these to ever really be "generic" options that could apply to any site because the number of possible permutations of how someone could design a column of text is enormous, so there's no easy way to just make a column reflow in a generic way that would apply to any situation.

Alternatively you can just nuke the site-supplied stylesheet entirely and read the page unstyled. This works universally, but you remove all or most of the styling in the process.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:38 PM on December 31, 2005

I agree if you want something that specific to your needs, a Greasemonkey script approach is probably the best answer. I quickly looked at Greasemonkey script sites earlier today, but nothing jumped out at me as a close match to what you want to do. I could easily have missed something, though, so don’t take that as gospel.

If you or a friend is familiar with basic Javascript and DOM-level programming, it's likely not that difficult to mess around and change styles at the level you want using Greasemonkey. Actually, I’ve been playing with Greasemonkey for the past couple of weeks to reacquaint myself with Javascript et al, and have coded up Metafilter delete/highlight flexible filtering extensions as a learning project. If you can’t find what you want elsewhere and want to pursue a simple resolution, let me know and I’ll see if I can toss something acceptable together for you. I’m still a bit rusty on JS and can use the practice. Heck, if it’s reasonably generic and sufficiently useful as a style reformatter, it could be a good idea for a public script release.
posted by mdevore at 11:45 PM on December 31, 2005