Reading Paul Graham's essays online
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
I really enjoy reading
Paul Graham's essays. He's recently posted a few more essays on
his web site: one
about
"How to Start a Startup" and one on
"Undergraduation". However, even though I enjoy reading his
essays, I dislike the way his articles are formatted on his web
site. His essay footnotes aren't hyperlinked (so I have to scroll down
to the bottom of the article to read the footnote and then scroll
back again to where I was in the document) and the column width of
his articles is so narrow (especially when you're using a wide screen
like I have on my 17 inch PowerBook) that I'm always paging
down. The narrow format is especially unfriendly (unless you own
shares in a paper company ;-) ) if you want to print
the article to give to someone. Luckily, I've just discovered
greasemonkey, a Firefox browser extension that let's you add
Javascript to specific web pages. I'm using two scripts (see
here and
here) to add hyperlinks to footnotes and widen the text on any
page on Paul Graham's site. They
make it much nicer to read Paul's essays. Here's a screen shot of
Safari (with the normal formatting) and Firefox (with the "massaged" formatting):
I really love that greasemonkey Firefox
extension!
Update-2005-03-24: Eric Hanchrow pointed out that it is also
possible to disable style sheets in Firefox - this will at least
allow you to view Paul's essays in a wider format. To do this, you
select the View|Page Style|No Style menu option.
