Multi-column articles

By Raking Leaves Last update Feb 2, 2010 — Installed 6,879 times.


Script Summary: A multi-column, multi-page viewer for long web articles, inspired by the New York Times Reader software.

Script homepage

This script provides a multi-column, multi-page viewer for long web articles from several web sites. Here's a screenshot:



The currently supported sites are: 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). To get the original printer-friendly page, simply disable Greasemonkey and re-load.

Supporting more sites should be fairly straightforward. Patches are welcome :). See the script homepage for more details.

Here's a changelog:

  • 0.5.2: Upgraded to Hyphenator 2.4.0. Small fixes for NYBooks, The Atlantic, LA Times.
  • 0.5.1: Small fixes for NYTimes and The Atlantic.
  • 0.5.0: Added hyphenation, via the hyphenator script (requires Firefox 3). Support for SFGate and The Economist. Also, support for BBC News, ABC News, Newsweek, and Time, contributed by ihq. Fixes for Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
  • 0.4.1: Fixed Washington Post.
  • 0.4.0: Added ability to use custom style for paragraphs. Added outer margin, as suggested by neetij. Other small fixes.
  • 0.3.5: Fixed bugs in calculating height of column text. Hopefully, columns will now be appropriately sized to avoid vertical scrolling. Also, added initial support for Wikipedia.
  • 0.3.0: Overhaul of scrolling implementation. Various bugs like text slightly off the page or too few pages should be (mostly) fixed. Occasionally, there will now be an extra blank page; this is a known issue. Also, fixed Boston Review.
  • 0.2.1: Added support for The Guardian. Small fix for The Atlantic.
  • 0.2: Add option to disable smooth scrolling. Disable prev and next buttons when appropriate. Minor fixes for sites.
  • 0.1.8: Support for Foreign Affairs. Small fix for Mac.
  • 0.1.7: Support for Wall Street Journal.
  • 0.1.6.1: Small fix for Washington Post.
  • 0.1.6: Support for Wired, contributed by Liam.
  • 0.1.5: Support for Slate and The Seattle Times
  • 0.1.4: Support for San Jose Mercury News, contributed by Tracy Logan.
  • 0.1.3: Improved aesthetics, contributed by Dave.
  • 0.1.2: Added support for New York Magazine.
  • 0.1.1: Made text justified, which looks better to me for narrow columns. I may change this back if anyone complains.
  • 0.1: Initial release.

Finally, here are some other scripts that work well with this one: