Ever been annoyed by crappy styling of online newspaper sites? Worry no more! Readability (by Arc90) is a wonderful tool that puts default text placement and styling into overdrive.
What Readability does is, it removes everything but the primary content of the page (which it recognizes pretty well). The resulting text & images is then formatted and styled according to the principles of web typography. It makes reading online text really, really pleasurable.
It happens that I’m the maintainer of Readability Redux, the Google Chrome extension that adds support for the original library (Chrome, as opposed to Firefox, doesn’t allow drag n’ drop of links into the toolbar, hence extension needed).
If you haven’t checked out this tool yet, do it now – Arc90 has released an upgraded version that includes additional styling options. More, the new styles utilize Typekit –Â another interesting tool that makes the Web more beautiful.
The main point of this post, though, is that I’ve released Readability Redux 1.1, supporting the aforementioned upgraded version.
Enjoy!
PS. Readability Redux is hosted on GitHub.
MH's dev efforts 
Here is a page that does not work with Readability Redux:
http://bopuc.levendis.com/weblog/archives/-2004/09/14/just_one_word_plastics.php
Only the top section is presented by Readability Redux, and it is the tiny font of the comments below the top section that need it most.
PS I tried the original Readability bookmarklet and it also does not work on that page, so it is not a fault of your Redux port.
When reported to Arc90, they responded that Readability does not yet have the capability to display comments on blogs.
Ken, I’ve made a patch for Readability Redux that lets you select text which should be “made readable”. You just highlight the text you want, then click the Readability icon on the toolbar. The patch is still pretty crude (doesn’t always work as desired), but I hope the author, M. Hordecki, will pick it up.
I’d love to get an improved version incorporated into Readability Redux. I’d rather not further polute the Chrome Extensions Gallery by publishing yet-another-slightly-different-version of something. Did that once already, and I see that /loads/ of people are doing it…so it seems rather spammy (appologies to those who made truely worthwhile variations of existing extensions).
I can package my changes in an extension and deliver it privately, if you want.
Chrome 4.1.249.1030 supports dragging links into the bookmarks bar (Ctrl-B to hide or show). I’m not sure when this support was added, but I’ve had it for a month or two. Maybe longer, since it’s not something I often do.
The extension is easier to reconfigure than regular Readability, since I don’t have to do either:
a) add a large number of bookmarklets to by bookmarks bar to get variations
b) create a new bookmarklet at Arc90’s site, and delete the old bookmarklet
My Readability preference tends to change depending on length of content, proximity of the monitor, relative brightness of the monitor (compare to surrounding light), and whether I’ve been either up too late or awakened too early.
Props to M. Hordecki for making it easier to use!
Hello,
First of all, great extension đŸ˜€ I love it!
May I suggest that the font colors for “code” or everything inside a PRE-tags retain the font color?
Or better yet, how do can I add my own styles?
Thank you so much for this extension.
-Wenbert
That may be a bit of an intensive hack at this point, since original Readability script — which this extension uses — does a lot of heavy modification of the page as it makes the ‘readable’ version. That is, more intensive than the patch I submitted to MH and Arc90.
Not sure I’m up to it, but there may be happy things in the works!
Is there any way to enable Readability for all web-pages (i.e if Readability can handle a page, it should get applied)? Sort of like a Readable mode for the browser that can be toggled via the R button, with a blacklist of URLs not to be passed through readability (standard web-apps – gmail, fb, reader, etc?).
I agree with ct-April. It is a great idea to have atleast a hotkey that toggles “Readable mode” in the browser.
Great extension and thanks for your work. You have made my life a lot easier.
HI Guys,
love the extension for chrome!!
1 thing – can you please add a customisable hotkey to make the currenty page ‘Readabile’
i just want to the Crtl R or whatever to enable Reability
Cheers
Justin
I am apparently missing something. I have been using Readability on Firefox without a problem. I installed the Readability Redux for Chrome and can’t figure out how to cause it to work. How does one get it to function?
Hei,
can you please update the javascript to the latest version?
if you have a github repo, i would love to fork it and do it myselfs…
thanks,
bodo
This is a great extension. Nice work!
In the spirit of less distraction, is there any way to make the links look like regular text as well?
Thanks for your support, fellows! I’ve just pushed RR 1.2 which supports latest Readability.
Why does the extension need access to my browsing history?
Enrico, it needs permission to edit any page you view (to “make it readable”). This permission means that technically it would be possible to record or transmit information about every page you view. The point of the warning that Chrome gave you is that the browser has no way to verify that sneaky stuff isn’t going on, so you should not install unless you trust the source.
You can verify the sourcecode yourself by saving a copy of the extension, decompressing with an ‘unzip’ programme, and examining the included script and HTML files.