I’ve recently upgraded to a new large screen monitor. It’s great for many things–but browsing the internet is not one of them. Fixed width web pages look awkward in the middle of my browser with massive amounts of space on either side and liquid layouts cause LONGGGGGGG lines of text, which makes reading much more difficult. I forget the exact study, but I remember reading a study that anything more than 60 words per line and your reader will lose their much more often.
Wikipedia uses a liquid layout for their articles, and this makes reading articles on hard-to-understand topics that much more difficult to comprehend.
This Greasemonkey script for Firefox will adjust the width of the content to make it easier to digest. Nothing fancy here. Just few changes to the styles–but helpful nonetheless!
Click through to get the script.
// ==UserScript==
// @name Shrink Wikipedia
// @namespace local
// @description makes the wikipedia reading area have shorter lines and centers it in the screen.
// @include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*
// ==/UserScript==
var content = document.getElementById('content');
content.style.maxWidth = '800px';
content.style.margin = '37px auto';
content.style.borderRight = '1px solid #aaa';
var menu = document.getElementById('p-cactions');
menu.style.maxWidth = '800px';
menu.style.left = '30%';
