weateallthepies.com

I read a lot online, including a lot of short fiction magazines and websites with lengthy articles but I’m often put off by the page layouts or design when what I really want is the text.

Previously I’ve cut and paste text and put it on my ereader,  I’ve written scripts to scrape the text automatically and I played with greasemonkey scripts to create simple versions of a few sites I read regularly.

Recently though I’ve found TidyRead which pretty much does exactly what I need. It works as a plugin or bookmarklet and for any web page you wish it will try and strip out all the extra information just leaving you with the main article text and images in a clean easy to read single page with options for colour and font sizes.

TidyRead renders web pages with better readability as an-easy-to-read manner, similar to eBooks, by accurately extracting the context text and removing the cluttered materials. Read what you should and nothing else.

I’ve been reading the quite excellent Clarkesworld Magazine with this and have found it far more pleasant with larger text, a dark background and light grey text which is easier on the eyes.