Thursday, May 03, 2007

Multi-Column Article View Greasemonkey Script

I'm finally ready to reveal to the world my procrastination tool of the past few weeks, a Greasemonkey script that creates a multi-column, multi-page view of long articles. A screenshot will probably do much more than that description:

The view is obviously inspired by the New York Times Reader (which I've previously written about). Usage should be fairly straightforward. For most sites, using the script simply requires navigating to the printer-friendly version of an article (the original article is modified for sites like nybooks.com that don't provide printer-friendly pages). The pages can be navigated with the left and right arrow keys or with the buttons.

Some aspects of the script are not entirely debugged. In particular, sometimes the text alignment on a page is slightly off. I've found that slightly resizing the window often fixes this problem. If there are any Javascript experts out there, I'd welcome a patch to make the script more robust. Also note that I've primarily used the script along with Adblock, and it's possible that if ads are present the viewer will misbehave.

The viewer works on the printer-friendly version of an article, or the main article if no printer-friendly view exists. The following sites are currently supported:I also welcome patches to support more sites; hopefully it shouldn't be too difficult. You can get the script from this page on userscripts.org. Let me know if you like it or if you have problems / suggestions.

Update (5/22): I updated the screen shot to show the aesthetic changes in version 0.1.3 contributed by Dave.

Update (6/27): Instead of updating things in two places, I'm only going to keep the userscripts.org page up-to-date with a complete list of supported sites and a change log from now on. So go there to see the latest news.