CRX id
ahpddjnipchhaibcblojgdegkfeceddn
ahpddjnipchhaibcblojgdegkfeceddn
Description from extension meta
Read your websites more relaxed with automatic columns for wide content.
Image from store
Description from store
Are you tired of big walls of text in articles ? Wait no more! Here comes the auto formatter for wide columns. It automatically converts big text blocks in websites into columns, which are easier and more relaxed to read. Text size is increased to 16px, which is the recommendation of w3c and designers as default font size of normal text. If a page does not display correctly because of fancy css in the design of some pages, you can always disable and enable the extension/columns by clicking on the button in the toolbar. it works without reloading the page.
you can turn off the badge-number in the options menu of the extension.
v1.19: cleanup code. removed customization of stylesheet, use another extension if you want to do this.
v1.18 : migrate to manifest v3
v1.16 : small bugfix
More details:
This plugin uses latest css3 column-width property to layout the blobs of text in paragraphs as nicely readable columns. Works with all websites, best on long boring text, eg. news articles. Screenshot of wikipedia is only one example.
The plugin has an icon to toggle the state, and keeps your current format-style for all open pages. The plugin is smart enough to detect which paragraphs to convert, eg. 1 or 2 liners are kept, if images or video/iframe (youtube) embeds are detected also the original format is kept, this way the layout looks best.
Font size is set to 16px which is good for normal reading distance, but not too big. Font is set to Verdana which works good with this column-sizes.
The first letter is a bit bigger, so one can easily detect a new row of columns.
The paragraphs are split into several columns and adopt to your browser width or the available width in the layout. most of the layout is preserved, but the readability is improved. With the toolbar-icon you can always turn back to the original layout, but after some time the new columns look normal and long lines look odd.
With extension-options you can change your preferred column-width, min-height and font-style for paragraphs.
Optimizations for Wikipedia:
* Read in columns
* navigation is on top and collapsed and shows on hover
* column width for images is optimized for column width.
Latest reviews
- (2021-10-18) Pat MySecret: I appreciate this because it got me thinking of possibilities, but it could use simpler feature options for the layman, like characters or word per line.. that kind of thing.
- (2020-08-28) success actions: It makes reading easier. Thank u.
- (2019-05-06) First Last: okay for Wikipedia. However is there a way to make it work on the google.com search results? I could not find a way to do that.
- (2017-12-07) Jachym Michal: A great addon, really makes reading Wikipedia easier :).
- (2017-09-03) Erika Barr: Helps my eyes focus. Thank you!!
- (2017-02-25) Jim Seidman: Control over column width doesn't work. E.g., on my 4K display, with a maximized window, a width of 1200px somehow gives me 4 columns on Wikipedia, while a width of 1300px gives me only one column.
- (2016-12-07) David Filskov: Columns are too narrow - changing width in Options doesn't work.
- (2016-03-26) James Bond: This should automatically be part of EVERY web browser as an option. Great Extension!
- (2016-01-17) Isaac Elbaz: Finally! that's all what I needed! also give a great flexibility! thank you so much!
- (2015-05-17) Andreas Fliesberg: column-width setting doesnt seem to do anything, i think the columns are a bit too narrow
- (2015-05-13) かじやのウサギ: Please support for HTML li elements also. Indeed, some customizes are needed in some cases. But comfort reading is exactly there.
- (2014-12-17) Ma Xiang: how to set number of columns? I don't like it automatically divide into three columns. hard to read.
Latest issues
- (2017-02-05, v:1.16) Volker Koenigsbuescher: Number of columns
Proposals - make it configurable by website, e.g.: for Wikipedia another column widt than for CNN. Also, if Columns is switched on or off for a specific site - make options and the help text more understandable. I didn't bring it to work e.g. for Wikipedia to switch it to two columns with more than 6 lines per block, just nothing I tried seemed to work. - (2015-02-04, v:1.16) Daniel Unterberger: How to change number of columns ?
Go into options of the extension and change the -webkit-column-width: .., it will change the number of columns according to the available space. don't forget to set the "use user-style" to 1, so it will used, else it uses the default stylesheet. - (2014-07-26, v:1.11) Joel Schmidt: Options ignored; CSS class; and Hyphenator!
Hi, thanks for your Columns extension, it is quite good (and actually the best one I found for this purpose), however the styles I change in the options (including the ones in the extra field for column width) are completely ignored (I prefer my columns in the original font and about 400px wide). That's not much of a problem since I can still overwrite the styles for Columns by using Stylish, but I think Columns should work on its own. In addition I would suggest to use a CSS classname that is less prone to collisions; "columns" is certainly used by a lot of developers or even CSS frameworks as a standard class for a distinct purpose that is not necessarily compatible with yours. Even "Columns-columns" would probably suffice. Now this is how you could make this extension really awesome: Add an option to include Hyphenator! https://code.google.com/p/hyphenator That way the columns can be set to justified alignment and the text can be hyphenated, which is especially useful for narrow columns such as your default 220px ones. If I want to use Hyphenator now I have to employ a bookmark or Tampermonkey, both of which I'd rather not do all the time; furthermore it hyphenates the whole page, but you could add another option that would limit hyphenation to the columns created by your extension (since you can pass a parameter to Hyphenator telling it to look for your CSS class only). Hope you like the ideas. Keep up the good work! Regards, J. Schmidt