I just came across this great feature in Safari (having downloaded it for Windows 7) that’s called ‘Safari Reader’. It allows you to read articles on any webpage in an extremely readable, uncluttered pane.
Having seen the great utility of this tool, I immediately searched for an equivalent for chrome. Turns out, there’s an extension provided by readability.com that does just that. Reading one of my previous posts using readability, I found it to be a great tool that enhances readability of any page; it’s not only the uncluttered interface but also beautiful typography that will make reading long passages/blogs much much better.
The default pane looks pretty good. The font is modern, yet highly readable on-screen. Click the image below to see full-size snap.
[caption id=”attachment_598” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”The default, large-font display provided by the Readability.com extension”]
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You can also customize it to give a much more book-like feel. It can turn hyperlinks into footnotes, allows you to re-define the text size and the paragraph width. It also has a couple of pre-defined themes that work really well.
[caption id=”attachment_599” align=”aligncenter” width=”300” caption=”Changing the theme is very easy on Readability extension. Pick a different theme, check the option to convert hyperlinks to footnotes and change the font-size to suit your preferences.”]
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There’s also a wordpress plugin that allows you to let your readers view your posts in readability pane but I didn’t really like that. An alternative to that is to insert custom hyperlinks using the URL shortener rdd.me. You can read this post in readability using this link.