Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkersten | Hacker News Reader

Pity the websites text takes up only 20% the width of my monitor... text looks cramped and awkward to read while 80% of my monitor is blank white space...

View on HN

Longer line lengths are harder on the eyes. There's a reason why newspapers and magazines use columns.

I'm a big believer in columns. See the recent redesign of http://hackerstream.com (clicking on stories or users creates new streams/columns), and my previous project, http://readwarp.com

Luckily, the wonderful Readability can be used for these situations: https://www.readability.com/

Which then proceeds to cut off the first paragraph.

Instapaper's Text view works better here.

http://www.instapaper.com/extras

http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.t3.org%2Ft...

Now it takes up 33%. Could be better still, but this is good enough - it is readable now! Thanks.

Can instapaper be customized? Can I make it wider still?

Yes, click the slightly non-obvious "Aa" item added at the top and it will open options to customize.

There are two rectangle icons that allow you to increase and reduce the margin.

Awesome, thank you.

One of the few unique features of Safari is the "Reader" button (similar to readability), which I find very useful in reading such content (it's also great when applied to Anandtech, Arstechnica or other sites where article page count goes to double digits).

I used readability on this link. It actually dropped the 'Epilogue' on this one which left me scratching my head for a couple seconds before I backed out. But readability is incredibly handy on almost every ugly/noisy content page, it's one of the few tools I use every day.

I didn't know Safari had a "Reader" button (I usually stick to FF/Chrome), out of curiosity do you know who implemented the idea first?

Safari's "Reader" button is implemented with code from Readability. (Note the presence of Arc90 license verbiage in Help > Acknowledgements.)

I get extremely peeved by all of those blog themes that have 400px content columns. Grr.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com