titanonearth

Changing text justification in Safari 5’s Reader

Much has already been said about the pros and cons of Safari 5’s new Reader functionality. I think that all the people dissing the typography of Safari 5 in general are exaggerating the issue somewhat. However, they are right that left-aligned (or ragged right) text is more readable on a screen. Fortunately this is easy to fix:

This hint on Mac OS X Hints describes how to change the look and feel of the Reader. You only need to change one file in /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Reader.html

Look for this block of text

        .page {
            font: 20px Palatino, Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif;
            line-height: 160%;
            text-align: justify;
        }

And change the text-align from justify to left. Of course, as the Mac OS X Hints article says, messing with application resources is fraught with dangers. Make a backup, at least of the original Reader.html file before editing. Also once Safari 5 updates you may have to apply this change again.

Now I want Reader on my iPad, please. Until then I will continue to use Readability.