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Comment by roryokane | Hacker News Reader

If you have the Stylish browser add-on (https://userstyles.org/), you can make this book much easier to read with this custom style I just wrote: “The Art of Unix Programming, and … Usability – improve readability”, https://userstyles.org/styles/107208/.

Here is the main part of the style’s CSS, if you just want to use your developer tools on each page:

    body {
        font-size: 20px;
        line-height: 1.3;
        max-width: 700px;
        margin-left: auto;
        margin-right: auto;
    }

I referred to http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html when choosing these numbers.

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I'll note that you can also go to http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taouu/taouu.html for the full book at once, which makes it more feasible to add these styles via console without going nuts and without needing an add-on (or if you're in Safari...).

There's a Stylish extension for Safari too.

Good to know; userstyles.org doesn't mention it Safari on the page linked, at least.

Much obliged. I'd not heard of Stylish but I'd been making these kind of adjustments (based on similar rules form another less comprehensive site) directly in developer tools, so you've made my life a little easier and I've learnt a little more about good typography.

Thank you.

And I had heard of userstyles.org, but not read any of practicaltypography.com. Many thanks for introducing me to a concise, well-presented collection of typography best practices.

Thanks for sharing. I'm just beginning to write style like this.

I also recommend Merriweather font for reading.

Stylish is really nice (I use it for a lot of things), but Safari has a builtin Readability-type feature (I forget what it's called) that automatically loads the next pages up until the end of the chapter. Even better, and it works on iOS too.

Stylish, is really nice. It has been my only option so far of being able to force site to use my preferred fonts since sites started using icon fonts (which makes the "Allow site to use their own fonts" checkbox in Firefox useless).

I've a steady growing databases of styles to use for popular sites. The main problem I still have is I set "font-weight: normal" in a global style which disables bold text.

Is there any site like Readability from a few years ago where you can just paste in a URL and get a cleaned up readable version?

Like... Readability? :) I use it all the time. https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets

Thanks! I couldn't find that page. The readability front page only lets you sign up, which I would rather not.

There's an "Apps & Addons" button at the top, and a Download button at the bottom. This is true even on the mobile version of the page.

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