coming soon, the "legible version" link

[rone]

Am i the only person who, upon finding an article on the Web that has a "printable version", follows it immediately to achieve tolerable legibility?

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

No, you are not.

On some pages, I use the Select All function to make the text legible. As you can plainly see, I am much too patient for my own good.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yep, i use that trick, too, although not very often.

[anavolena.livejournal.com]

i usually just select the current paragraph i'm reading with the mouse.

or ctrl-a, as i'm usually stuck with windoze.

[marknau.livejournal.com]

Taking Erik's trick one step further, I have occasionally resorted to copy-and-pasting all text into a plain-text application.

[erikred.livejournal.com]

That's a very good variation, and I've resorted to it on more than one occasion.

Mind you, I've also gone so far as to fire up lynx so I can avoid all of the background imagery and distracting baloney.

[broken-gizmo.livejournal.com]

Mind you, I've also gone so far as to fire up lynx so I can avoid all of the background imagery and distracting baloney.

I do this!

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

For me it depends on the site, just how bad it is, how it's bad, and whether I'm already familiar with it.

There are sites where I click "zoom 120%" or "zoom 150%" before they finish loading. There are sites (and some LJ users' journals) where I click "switch to user style sheet" by reflex (yes, I use Opera), there are sites where I switch to a telnet window and use Lynx (or Links if the formatting isn't quite Lynx-friendly), and there are sites where I already know where on the screen the "printer friendly" button will appear and I click that.

There are also sites that I glance at, say, "Fuck that," and close the window. Come to think of it, there are a whole lot of those.

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Nope.

And I do the copy and paste thing that was already mentioned, if necessary.

[agentelrond.livejournal.com]

I usually do that just to get rid of the ads.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

That, too. Doesn't work on SciAm, though, and it gets rid of the images that are actually part of the article. Dumb.

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

No.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

I do it too.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

In egregious cases, yes.

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

I've got images blocked from most of the advertising providers. I use the "Flash Click To Play" extension so that flash ads don't annoy me (and don't churn up 90% of my CPU). Sometimes I use the printable version, sometimes I select the whole thing, sometimes I use view source. If none of those fix it, usually I just say fuck it and go on with my life. Life is too short to waste it looking at web pages that don't want to be looked at.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It's one thing i miss about Opera: being able to switch between the site's style sheet and your user-generated style sheet.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, though more often than not I've already jumped to a links session instead if the page looks bad.

[cks.livejournal.com]

You are definitely not alone. I have become addicted to the recent Mozilla/Firefox feature that totally neuters all CSS, fonts, backgrounds, etc (View / Use Style / None; it may only be present in the development versions).

It may make the web look like I'm still using Mosaic, but darnit I could read the web back in the Mosaic days.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Oh, brilliant, thanks for the tip.

All Firefox needs now is a button that toggles between "no images / cached images / load all images" and i'll cease to miss Opera.

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]