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Comment by k1m | Hacker News Reader

I work on something called https://txtify.it that you can prefix onto almost any article URL to get a plain text-only version, e.g.

https://txtify.it/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/29/nyregio...

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Love it! It even produces content that supports reader mode (in Firefox, at least.)

Now how do I automate this? Maybe a simple bookmarklet?

If you paste:

var url = document.URL ; var title = document.title ; window.location.href = "https://txtify.it/" + document.URL;

into: https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/

Then drag the bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar, you've got a one-click textify option :)

Very nice! I should add a bookmarklet to the home page.

Cool project! My only complain is it defaults font to Courier (monospaced) which is harder to read and takes more place. You might use ‘Georgia’ which is web safe and pretty legible. Or of course, Times New Roman (just like site on this post)

Please refer:

https://practicaltypography.com/monospaced-fonts.html

https://practicaltypography.com/body-text.html

Since it is literally plain text (as opposed to HTML) it will default to the monospaced font set in your browser.

You're right, but I think this depends on the browser too. I actually pass a stylesheet in the HTTP response header to make text appear white on a black background. Firefox respects this, but Chrome doesn't (at least for plain text files):

  link: <https://txtify.it/dark.css>; rel="stylesheet"

Will have to test again when I get some time to see what the options are. Might be a bit of a hack as there really aren't any HTML elements to target, so it might be that Firefox applies the CSS after inserting the text into an HTML template.

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