Is it possible to set up Textise to use a custom font I have in windows.
I would like to print my own blog entries with a script font onto 4×6 cards. I’ve got everything except the script font figured out.
Is this a css mod ?
At the moment, Textise only supports a selection of “web-safe” fonts (as you probably noticed).
If you need a different font, I suppose you have two choices:
1) Copy and paste the Textise output into a word processor and change the font there.
2) Edit the Textise cookie, changing its current font value to the local one you want to use. The location of the cookie varies according to the browser you’re using. Let me know if you need help with this – I haven’t tried it myself but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work.
Hello, your blog is very instructive and Textsize is very useful.
My question is:
Is it possible to predetermine the font type, size and other characteristics of the page obtained with Textsize by modifying the bookmarklet?
Let me explain: that the page obtained with the bookmarklet has the options that are chosen from the possible ones offered by https://www.textise.net/textiseOptions.aspx.
I have tried modifying the cookie, but I can’t get the page readable to have Comic sanserif font and the “Textise information” to appear “At the bottom”. I would also like to remove all the links so that only the truly informative text of the page appears.
I have also tried to make the text scroll (with another bookmarklet), but the page obtained does not support code injection.
Thank you in advance for your attention and your time.
Thanks for saying hello. It’s great to hear you’re finding Textise useful.
The options you chose should work fine, whether or not you’re using the bookmarklet.
Putting the Textise info at the bottom won’t make any difference to the messages about the new code, which will always remain at the top I’m afraid. There’s an option to remove links (link destination: plain text).
Sorry – missed the last part of your question.
No, it’s not a CSS mod. Behind the scenes there’s a web service written in C# that parses the HTML, removing certain tags, amending others and modifying links.
I just discovered your site via the Firefox add-ons and it seems great.
I was just wondering why you’re removing some elements like the titles, and perhaps other elements. As far as I know, from an accessibility or search-engine point of view, these elements are understood by screen readers and bots and it makes the page more readable by giving its organization.
The answer, I guess, is yes – Textise removes pretty much all the formatting apart from ordered lists (bullet points). This doesn’t really affect search engines, of course, because the program makes temporary, text-only versions of pages, the original versions of which are search engine-understandable. I appreciate your point about titles but the idea I had for Textise was to be quite ruthless in getting hold of the text, nothing more and nothing less! I wanted users to be able to make web-sites look like they were being viewed in Notepad or in a command prompt, and they can! From other feedback I’ve received, it seems that screen readers work fine with the program.
Thanks again for your interest. Any other comments or suggestions you may have are always gratefully received.
Hi ian, used your Textise once. Excellent.
It now sits in my Firefox list of add-ons but cannot boot it again. How do I bring it to life and how do I get a desktop icon ?
Hi Mark,
If you’re using Firefox 3.6, that would explain the problem – the add-on doesn’t work with 3.6 at the moment (you’ll find me moaning about this elsewhere in the blog!). I’ll be fixing it soon, hopefully. In the meantime, if you’d like a desktop icon, you could could set up a browser icon pointing at the Textise home page, http://www.textise.net. Go to the page and drag the Textise logo from the address bar to your desktop – should do the trick.
Glad you like the program!
Ian
I was wondering if there would be a way to constrain a textised page’s width. It would be nice to have an option of setting the width to something like 800px. reading text that is very wide, as is the case if I leave my browser maximised, is difficult to read, which is why newspapers and magazines use columned formats.
This is a good point and actually one that has been raised before. My original thoughts were, “Just re-size your browser”, but I’m beginning to see how that might be quite inconvenient. I’m planning some new features at the moment and this one definitely goes on the “possibles” pile.
Just installed the FF addon to test a site I’m working on. Any chance you could have it read alt text for image map links? 🙂
I previously used YellowPipe Lynx Viewer Tool, but it’s not available in newer versions of FF.
Hey Adam,
This is a very good point. Textise will just zap image maps atm (as you may have noticed!). Not straightforward to keep the ALT text without slowing things down but I’ll definitely give it some thought.
If you need to do any testing in other browsers, the bookmarklet does the same job as the FF add-on.
Hi – thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have a think about this. I wouldn’t want the default behaviour to be to open in a new tab so it would have to be an option. It’s pretty simple, of course, to right-click and choose “open link in new tab” (or whatever your browser’s wording is).
a GREAT use for this addon is when at work, and you are trying to read non work related things. Its much more difficult to get caught when looking at text that images, headers, videos ect. I would love an option where I could right click a link, then have it open textised.
This is great!!! Is it possible to be able to open links in text mode only? It would be nice to right click on a link and have the option “view in text” instead of having to go to that page and then switch to text.
Great idea. Even better would be a lynx-like text-only browsing option, opening all pages as text-only until toggled off again. Also a keyboard shortcut to toggle would be most excellent.
Its a great add-on. I would like to see a button on the toolbar to control the default view for new URLs: if selected, all pages would be processed via Textise.
This is a great idea and has been requested before – and is on my To Do list! I’m hoping to get time to revamp the addon this year so it’s definitely a feature I’ll try to incorporate.
Just wanted to say that since Textise has moved to the dedicated server, I have had no issues with it at all. Prior to this, in addition to occasional “real” outages, I’d also receive reports of “outages” via CloudFlare, which would often be resolved on retrying within seconds. I attribute these to server overload. Since the dedicated server, it’s worked like a charm.
Brill – thanks for the feedback. I’m really glad it’s settled down now and that the server move was worth it. I also implemented some code to stop some hundreds of thousands of bogus requests hitting the app, which has also obviously made a big difference.
“Worked like a charm” makes me very happy!
Hello – is it possible to make the white background of the X icon transparent? In case it’s relevant I’m on 2.2.1 (for compatibility with PM browser). I can make transparent icons myself, but don’t know how to edit someone else’s code to do this. Many thanks in anticipation.
Hi,
To be honest, the FF addon needs a complete rewrite but you’d be surprised how complex that is! Unfortunately, I won’t be updating an older version but I will definitely consider a transparent image when I finally get round to updating the latest version.
Can I ask why you’re stuck with v2.2.1 on PM (I don’t know much about that browser).
Thank you. I understand. As it happens, I’ve discovered it’s not beyond me – if I treat the .xpi file as a zipped folder then there is an editable .png inside it, and I don’t need to edit code at all!
But since you ask why I’m “stuck with” v2.2.1 on Pale Moon, there is another way of looking at it which links to the earlier part of your response about the complexity of a rewrite. I hugely value all the work developers like you do in writing the add-ons that I use daily, and I’m aware that hundreds of add-ons – including, when last I checked, every single one I use – will be broken by Mozilla in the Autumn with FF57; and that many developers will not keep contributing their free time to work that Mozilla breaks.
So I am actually very happy to be ahead of the curve “stuck with” a browser that is committed to not breaking my add-ons!!!
Would you be interested in porting your add-on over to be Pale Moon compatible?
Although PM does not support Mozilla Add-on SDK, there is PMKit (http://developer.palemoon.org/Add-ons:Extensions/Jetpack) for adapting JetPack extensions (basically, a library that provides basic compatibility layer with Mozilla Add-on SDK).
It would be nice to make this extension available to more people, as Firefox is doing away with JetPack extensions anyway, so adapting it for use with Pale Moon is a great way to bring your extension to other users!
Many thanks for your excellent suggestion. I’ve just checked and can confirm that the Textise bookmarket works perfectly with Pale Moon. To be honest, I’m considering giving up with the FF add-on, as Mozilla’s constant changes make it difficult to maintain, and the bookmarklet achieves almost the same thing (no right-click/contextual functionality).
I will, of course, have a look at the info you sent: if PM is going to remain stable it might be worth converting the add-on.
Oh, and don’t forget that you can also use Textise directly from http://www.textise.net, which also allows you to run text-only searches using Google, Yahoo or Bing.
Years ago Netflix had a text view listing movies by title, genre, year, language. It was a menu item called SORTED LISTS. Admittedly crude and minimal but far better than the idiocy of scanning thru huge tiles of meaningless box art. I prefer searching media pages without box art which wastes 80% screen space and totally distracts from the real content and meaning of the film. A text only rendering of Nflx content pages that retains synopsis but compressed the page to a vertical text list in columns would be a wondrous advance in the search for important titles. it would correct the inherent deception in huge graphics pages with only ten or fifteen titles decorated with posters seemingly created for illiterates.
Hastings et al have simply destroyed our film heritage with his erasure of history in the form of search idiocy. Each generation have less info on fewer movies available because of the thousands of films purged when media standards fade and die. Thousands of VHS DVD, titles have disappeared over the years, dropped from “popular” view. Incompetent search function guarantees a self propagating subtraction of titles over time.
Nflx could have made alliances with sources like IMDB, Instantwatcher, IMCDB (http://www.imcdb.org/) or or any of the many film locations DBs. I would like to discover or buy a translation utility that scrapes graphics box art off movies and book browser lists and presents a “grown up” view in the form of a text listing with supporting columns of related info.
Title
Genre
Year of Production
Language / Nation
IMDB link (Cast and History)
Location / Artifacts Links
Review Links
You would think a presumably educated adult like Hastings who we mistakenly assumed was interested in film as a fan or film as history could have thought of this and incorporated it into his Netflix invention. Apparently entrepreneurs like Hastings only interest in media is extraction of profit from wreckage. Unfortunately the destruction of video stores seems to have been the net goal. Now that the local physical entity of movie, music, books and multi-media shops are dying or deceased, idiots like Hastings, Besos, Turner, et al can proceed to erase film history from the “inter-webs” in conjunction with the Leftist stupefaction of our universities.
Anyway, that is the gist of my RANT on the avaricious ignoramus imbeciles who have destroyed our film heritage and made it almost impossible to find and sort movie / book listings in any rational academic manner aside from pretty pictures by artists or balloon synopsis writers who may have never even seen or read the work in question.
Someone with your talent who could render Film Box Art pages of nonsense into rational text listings could put a brake on the destruction. You might provide a tool for intelligent sorting and investigation of important titles and the real artists. Not the Box Art Poster Pimps but the cast, staff, writers, historians and directors etc.
ie, part of the URL would either have b for bold or u for underline.
At the moment the settings tend to return to the default quite regularly. In my case, I keep needing to change LINK APPEARANCE from the default of bold to underlined a few times a day.
The other advantage of having it as part of the URL means that you would be able to bookmark the address so that the new settings would be retained, and any time the URL is shared, the recipient with see exactly the same page as the sender.
Hi Bruce,
Many thanks for the feedback. I like your idea – I’ll add it to the list!
Your settings shouldn’t keep disappearing like that, though. You do have cookies enabled?
I mainly use textise to make it easier to read blogs/news/etc on a mobile device because i can set the width of the page i dont have to sidescroll for content that isnt mobile optimized. It works great for that except sometimes a page has a single string of characters that is very long, currently textise doesnt break these which can mess up page widths which then require sidescroll to read again. I would really appreciate it if there was a style option for “word-wrap:break-word;” or something similar.
Thanks for reporting this problem. It’s something I am aware of (especially since it sometimes annoys me too!). It’s on the list for investigation; I hope to have a proper look at it quite soon.
Thanks for saying hello and thank you for the nice comments.
Just so that I understand, are you saying that Zotero doesn’t display text that’s in a JavaScript link? If so, you can change the way that Textise handles links on the Optins screen (https://www.textise.net/textiseOptions.aspx). Just change the Link Destination to “Plain text (no links)”. Let me know if that helps.
I hadn’t come across Zotero before so thank you also for bringing it to my attention – I think I might find it useful myself.
Hi! I love your website and your service! I use the service on all my computers, it’s great! I know it might not interest you much, but I just discovered it doesn’t work in FIreFox 3.6 on Fedora 24 . I’m not sure if it ever worked, since I don’t remember trying it on this LInux laptop, but I thought you might at a random chance like to hear about it. Yes, I do agree: text is better in most cases! It cuts out all the ads, click-baits, and other nonsense rampant on the web. Was there a point when you didn’t use JavaScript? Sorry to ask, but being a Luddite of a sort, text-only goes hand in hand with NoScript (JavaScript disabler), so I thought I’d ask that too.
Thanks for the suggestion. You won’t be surprised to know you’re not the first person to ask for this! It _is_ on the to-do list and I will try to implement soon-ish.
Does textise.net pass javascript from the site being rendered, over to the user requesting the site? I cannot determine this by experimentation so far. If textise.net does pass javascript, could this be conditionally enabled/disabled?
I am seeking “absolute minimum bandwidth” mechanism for mobile data service on my KaiOS phone (an operating system for some “feature phones”, which has nothing to do with Android) when accessing selected web sites (which do not need javascript nor graphics enabled to be useful to me). I have learned that a different browser available to install on KaiOS cannot be modified to disable image rendering due to the way it was implemented in KaiOS. Therefore, I found textise.net which solves the wish to disable graphics rendering, so I am now focused on full disable of javascript.
I am provided 200 MB – megabytes – per month of mobile data service, which is very quickly consumed by javascript and graphics rendering using the inbuilt browser of KaiOS (browser has no switches to control rendering).
So far, textise.net seems to be a valuable tool to help deal with extremely limited browser and extremely limited mobile data allocation.
I would be grateful if textise.net itself could function without javascript (the page seems simple enough I am surprised that javascript was actually required!). I saw that this request was preceded by a similar request previously; I “second” the request!
Thank you for the quick reply posting! It is good that javascript is not passed back – whatever javascript is part of your page itself seems to be small/lightweight, so I do not think it poses a load problem for the feature phone (at least mine, so far.)
Two other helpful (to me) feature requests, if you are in the mood/position to make an update the service:
1. A direct URL that incorporates textise.net and the target URL (for example. https://www.textise.net/nytimes.com would render nytimes.com directly as if I had entered that URL in the input bar). This would reduce the (extremely extremely) cumbersome “T9” typing needed to interact with the site. I see that the rendered URL is included as part of the rendering, but even that can be complex in some cases, which makes re-entering the whole URL “difficult” (as it is being entered on a telephone-type keyboard!)
2. An option (perhaps added to direct URL above with a change of delimiter character between http://www.textise.net and the target URL from ? to ! or something like that) to request a “quiet” rendering; this would suppress the informative text added by textise.net to the start of the rendered page (the text I am describing begins with “you have been randomly selected…” and ends with “…to add textise to your web site”.) In the rudimentary browser of the KaiOS feature phone (and probably others similarly situated), scrolling is difficult at best (repeatedly pressing a “down” button on the keypad, which makes physical noise due to the switch mechanism, and takes many many presses to get through the total amount of text involved.)
Anyway, I plan to put textise to work in my KaiOS feature phone as-is, but the changes described above would make it much more convenient to use!
Thanks again,
Dave
(and no, I am not typing this on my feature phone!)
The direct URL _has_ been requested before so we’ll definitely consider that. Obviously, you know that links in the text-only version will take you to Textised versions of the target pages (so you don’t have to type them in)?
I can imagine that the Textise header would be painful for you in these circumstances. Are you able to use cookies on the device? If you can get to the options page, you can set the footer to put the “Textise information” at the bottom. This will move most of the header text out of your way.
Please let us know how it goes with Textise and your feature phone.
I see the options page now, and have tested it on the desktop browser across an exit/restart of the browser. The KaiOS browser does support cookies and I think it would behave the same (I will test and advise.)
I tried to estimate the amount (bytes) of javascript generated for each page view on textise.net by looking at page source, however, there appears to be a few links that fetch javascript liibraries. Do you have any way to generate an estimate? If it is in the kilobytes range, it is probably “in the noise”, but if it is in the megabytes range, it will probably curtail my usage because the benefit accrues sufficiently only when a given page view totals in the tens of kilobytes (my 200 megabyte monthly data allocation is what drives this concern.)
So far my (very brief) experimentation verified that HTML target page links can be followed on the KaiOS device, which should avoid the need to manually follow links by URL entry.
At this point my highest priority would be direct URL; it is not a show-stopper, but it would be tremendously convenient.
I will do some more testing over the next few days and report any further findings or preferences around this use case.
Thanks again for your work on this – textise.net is so far the closest solution I’ve found!
I tested http://www.textise.net (just the page itself, not a rendered target page) using gtmetrix.com (I have not used any such tool before, so this was my first try.)
Specifics for data consumption were in a formatted graphic, but here are the details in text (there are numerous details about page fetch timing and number of fetches; those were not an immediate concern of mine but you may find them interesting.)
Total page size = 75.7KB (font=37.6kb, js=30.2kb, html=3.91kb, css=3.32kb)
Javascript in the main textise.net page is not a concern for me – I can use that page only for initial set-up (with wifi) and save the rendered page URLs as (the KaiOS browser equivalent of) “favorites”.
I tried submitting several different major web news sites to gtmetrix.com, but all failed with an error 403, so I was not able to determine what overhead would be generated by textise.net in a rendered page.
For my use, the primary concern would be overhead associated with presenting the textise’d web page to the browser – in this case, javascript, fonts, and navigation/informational text generated by textise.net all would work against the intended gain potential of using textise.net as a server-side browser portal for KaiOS.
Thanks again, Ian, this is fascinating stuff and I hope you find the use case worthy of your further interest!
and applied this to desktop PC (firefox with uBlock origin plug-in) with javascript disabled.
The result from textise.net rendered the text of the page itself (that’s good), however, links in the page were not directed back to textise.net, so that clicking a link in the rendered page sent the browser to the original form of the page (as the link was originally encoded); this would expose the KaiOS browser and mobile data allocation to a large amount of javascript, images and other undesirables, so from a practical point of view, it’s not a workable solution.
This does suggest to me that a non-Javascript version of textise.net would be non-trivial development effort, as the server-side processing would need to find and mark-up each link in the target page so that a clicked link would return to textise.net for processing (presumably each subsequent link follow would undergo the same outcome.) Whether that level of development (non-Javascript version) is worthwhile for you I cannot say, however, it would be an excellent outcome I think for this use case!
Thank you for Textise. Over 12 years of text-only web!
I notice that tags are not passed through. This can be seen in the first line of your About page https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A//textise.wordpress.com/about-textise/#content
The word “text” should be emphasized/italicized.
I do notice that tags are passed through.
I’m not sure what other basic html tags would be nice to pass through, but would be much appreciated!
Thanks again for years of service.
Many apologies for the very slow response. Somehow I managed to lose your comment for a couple of months.
With Textise, our aim was always to make the text-only output as near to plain text as possible, which is why most styling is removed. Once you start making exceptions it is – as I think you’ve already identified – difficult to know how far to go.
I’m glad you find Textise useful. 12 years?! How did that happen? 😀
Subjunctive Software 
Hi! Just to let you know, works well! Great idea.
Natalie
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Suggestion: can you add a space after you strip out a tag as the words all merge together.
Its coming on nicely now. I will definately put textise on my Christmas list!
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my previous post meant to say li tag, but I included the brackets so the tag got lost.
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If I enter the address of a PDF file could you automatically feed it through the Google pdf reader and then textise it?
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EG:
Click to access 2003-xensosp.pdf
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Is it possible to set up Textise to use a custom font I have in windows.
I would like to print my own blog entries with a script font onto 4×6 cards. I’ve got everything except the script font figured out.
Is this a css mod ?
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Hi Mark –
At the moment, Textise only supports a selection of “web-safe” fonts (as you probably noticed).
If you need a different font, I suppose you have two choices:
1) Copy and paste the Textise output into a word processor and change the font there.
2) Edit the Textise cookie, changing its current font value to the local one you want to use. The location of the cookie varies according to the browser you’re using. Let me know if you need help with this – I haven’t tried it myself but I see no reason why it wouldn’t work.
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Hello, your blog is very instructive and Textsize is very useful.
My question is:
Is it possible to predetermine the font type, size and other characteristics of the page obtained with Textsize by modifying the bookmarklet?
Let me explain: that the page obtained with the bookmarklet has the options that are chosen from the possible ones offered by https://www.textise.net/textiseOptions.aspx.
I have tried modifying the cookie, but I can’t get the page readable to have Comic sanserif font and the “Textise information” to appear “At the bottom”. I would also like to remove all the links so that only the truly informative text of the page appears.
I have also tried to make the text scroll (with another bookmarklet), but the page obtained does not support code injection.
Thank you in advance for your attention and your time.
XorAnd
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Hi,
Thanks for saying hello. It’s great to hear you’re finding Textise useful.
The options you chose should work fine, whether or not you’re using the bookmarklet.
Putting the Textise info at the bottom won’t make any difference to the messages about the new code, which will always remain at the top I’m afraid. There’s an option to remove links (link destination: plain text).
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Sorry – missed the last part of your question.
No, it’s not a CSS mod. Behind the scenes there’s a web service written in C# that parses the HTML, removing certain tags, amending others and modifying links.
Ian
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Hi Mark,
Thanks for your work. It’s awesome.
Here is a bookmarklet that could help (only tested in Firefox 3.6 with GNU/Linux) :
javascript:(function(){location=’http://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=’+escape(location)})();
And here is a Stylish style :
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.textise.net/showText.aspx) {
body{
color: #000 !important;
background-color: #fff !important;
font-family: “DejaVu Sans Mono” !important;
font-size: 1.2em !important;
}
a{
color:#00f !important;
text-decoration: underline !important;
font-weight: normal !important;
}
a:hover{
text-decoration: underline !important;
}
}
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Hello,
I just discovered your site via the Firefox add-ons and it seems great.
I was just wondering why you’re removing some elements like the titles, and perhaps other elements. As far as I know, from an accessibility or search-engine point of view, these elements are understood by screen readers and bots and it makes the page more readable by giving its organization.
However, good and interesting work.
Arhgi
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Hi Arghi,
Many thanks for the feedback.
The answer, I guess, is yes – Textise removes pretty much all the formatting apart from ordered lists (bullet points). This doesn’t really affect search engines, of course, because the program makes temporary, text-only versions of pages, the original versions of which are search engine-understandable. I appreciate your point about titles but the idea I had for Textise was to be quite ruthless in getting hold of the text, nothing more and nothing less! I wanted users to be able to make web-sites look like they were being viewed in Notepad or in a command prompt, and they can! From other feedback I’ve received, it seems that screen readers work fine with the program.
Thanks again for your interest. Any other comments or suggestions you may have are always gratefully received.
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Hi ian, used your Textise once. Excellent.
It now sits in my Firefox list of add-ons but cannot boot it again. How do I bring it to life and how do I get a desktop icon ?
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Hi Mark,
If you’re using Firefox 3.6, that would explain the problem – the add-on doesn’t work with 3.6 at the moment (you’ll find me moaning about this elsewhere in the blog!). I’ll be fixing it soon, hopefully. In the meantime, if you’d like a desktop icon, you could could set up a browser icon pointing at the Textise home page, http://www.textise.net. Go to the page and drag the Textise logo from the address bar to your desktop – should do the trick.
Glad you like the program!
Ian
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This is awesome. I am trying to set up a computer for my 80 year old Dad who is losing his vision.
Is there a way you can make this automatic so it cleans up every web page automatically without having to click a button?
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I was wondering if there would be a way to constrain a textised page’s width. It would be nice to have an option of setting the width to something like 800px. reading text that is very wide, as is the case if I leave my browser maximised, is difficult to read, which is why newspapers and magazines use columned formats.
Otherwise, I’m loving the addon.
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This is a good point and actually one that has been raised before. My original thoughts were, “Just re-size your browser”, but I’m beginning to see how that might be quite inconvenient. I’m planning some new features at the moment and this one definitely goes on the “possibles” pile.
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Hi Ken,
Options for setting text width now in place. Many thanks for the suggestion!
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Many thanks for following up Ian. You have done great work here.
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Hello…
Great add-on.
I like to know, there is any way to set textise to use a hotkey ?¿
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Hi,
Thanks for the feedback! I’m pretty sure I can set up a hotkey for the Firefox add-on. I’ll have a look and let you know if I manage it!
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Just installed the FF addon to test a site I’m working on. Any chance you could have it read alt text for image map links? 🙂
I previously used YellowPipe Lynx Viewer Tool, but it’s not available in newer versions of FF.
Thanks!
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Hey Adam,
This is a very good point. Textise will just zap image maps atm (as you may have noticed!). Not straightforward to keep the ALT text without slowing things down but I’ll definitely give it some thought.
If you need to do any testing in other browsers, the bookmarklet does the same job as the FF add-on.
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Can it open in a new tab? That would be useful when opening multiple pages from a search.
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Hi – thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have a think about this. I wouldn’t want the default behaviour to be to open in a new tab so it would have to be an option. It’s pretty simple, of course, to right-click and choose “open link in new tab” (or whatever your browser’s wording is).
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Thank you for the great work…keep up the good works..
Thanks!
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a GREAT use for this addon is when at work, and you are trying to read non work related things. Its much more difficult to get caught when looking at text that images, headers, videos ect. I would love an option where I could right click a link, then have it open textised.
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This is great!!! Is it possible to be able to open links in text mode only? It would be nice to right click on a link and have the option “view in text” instead of having to go to that page and then switch to text.
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Great idea. Even better would be a lynx-like text-only browsing option, opening all pages as text-only until toggled off again. Also a keyboard shortcut to toggle would be most excellent.
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Its a great add-on. I would like to see a button on the toolbar to control the default view for new URLs: if selected, all pages would be processed via Textise.
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Thanks for the feedback, Johan.
This is a great idea and has been requested before – and is on my To Do list! I’m hoping to get time to revamp the addon this year so it’s definitely a feature I’ll try to incorporate.
Ian
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Just wanted to say that since Textise has moved to the dedicated server, I have had no issues with it at all. Prior to this, in addition to occasional “real” outages, I’d also receive reports of “outages” via CloudFlare, which would often be resolved on retrying within seconds. I attribute these to server overload. Since the dedicated server, it’s worked like a charm.
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Brill – thanks for the feedback. I’m really glad it’s settled down now and that the server move was worth it. I also implemented some code to stop some hundreds of thousands of bogus requests hitting the app, which has also obviously made a big difference.
“Worked like a charm” makes me very happy!
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Hello – is it possible to make the white background of the X icon transparent? In case it’s relevant I’m on 2.2.1 (for compatibility with PM browser). I can make transparent icons myself, but don’t know how to edit someone else’s code to do this. Many thanks in anticipation.
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Hi,
To be honest, the FF addon needs a complete rewrite but you’d be surprised how complex that is! Unfortunately, I won’t be updating an older version but I will definitely consider a transparent image when I finally get round to updating the latest version.
Can I ask why you’re stuck with v2.2.1 on PM (I don’t know much about that browser).
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Thank you. I understand. As it happens, I’ve discovered it’s not beyond me – if I treat the .xpi file as a zipped folder then there is an editable .png inside it, and I don’t need to edit code at all!
But since you ask why I’m “stuck with” v2.2.1 on Pale Moon, there is another way of looking at it which links to the earlier part of your response about the complexity of a rewrite. I hugely value all the work developers like you do in writing the add-ons that I use daily, and I’m aware that hundreds of add-ons – including, when last I checked, every single one I use – will be broken by Mozilla in the Autumn with FF57; and that many developers will not keep contributing their free time to work that Mozilla breaks.
So I am actually very happy to be ahead of the curve “stuck with” a browser that is committed to not breaking my add-ons!!!
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I would like to use this excellent add-on in Pale Moon browser, a fork of Firefox with significant differences.
http://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml
http://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml#Firefox_Differences.
Would you be interested in porting your add-on over to be Pale Moon compatible?
Although PM does not support Mozilla Add-on SDK, there is PMKit (http://developer.palemoon.org/Add-ons:Extensions/Jetpack) for adapting JetPack extensions (basically, a library that provides basic compatibility layer with Mozilla Add-on SDK).
Many developers have successfully adapted their JetPack extensions for PM, as you can see here: https://github.com/JustOff/pm27-sdk-addons/blob/master/README.md
It would be nice to make this extension available to more people, as Firefox is doing away with JetPack extensions anyway, so adapting it for use with Pale Moon is a great way to bring your extension to other users!
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Hi Grace,
Many thanks for your excellent suggestion. I’ve just checked and can confirm that the Textise bookmarket works perfectly with Pale Moon. To be honest, I’m considering giving up with the FF add-on, as Mozilla’s constant changes make it difficult to maintain, and the bookmarklet achieves almost the same thing (no right-click/contextual functionality).
I will, of course, have a look at the info you sent: if PM is going to remain stable it might be worth converting the add-on.
Ian
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Oh, and don’t forget that you can also use Textise directly from http://www.textise.net, which also allows you to run text-only searches using Google, Yahoo or Bing.
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BTW, this also answers the question of why the previous write was “stuck” with an older version of the add-on.
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Is it possible to get ad-free embed code from you? Looking for non-extension bases ADA compliant options & yours looks promising.
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Years ago Netflix had a text view listing movies by title, genre, year, language. It was a menu item called SORTED LISTS. Admittedly crude and minimal but far better than the idiocy of scanning thru huge tiles of meaningless box art. I prefer searching media pages without box art which wastes 80% screen space and totally distracts from the real content and meaning of the film. A text only rendering of Nflx content pages that retains synopsis but compressed the page to a vertical text list in columns would be a wondrous advance in the search for important titles. it would correct the inherent deception in huge graphics pages with only ten or fifteen titles decorated with posters seemingly created for illiterates.
Hastings et al have simply destroyed our film heritage with his erasure of history in the form of search idiocy. Each generation have less info on fewer movies available because of the thousands of films purged when media standards fade and die. Thousands of VHS DVD, titles have disappeared over the years, dropped from “popular” view. Incompetent search function guarantees a self propagating subtraction of titles over time.
Nflx could have made alliances with sources like IMDB, Instantwatcher, IMCDB (http://www.imcdb.org/) or or any of the many film locations DBs. I would like to discover or buy a translation utility that scrapes graphics box art off movies and book browser lists and presents a “grown up” view in the form of a text listing with supporting columns of related info.
Title
Genre
Year of Production
Language / Nation
IMDB link (Cast and History)
Location / Artifacts Links
Review Links
You would think a presumably educated adult like Hastings who we mistakenly assumed was interested in film as a fan or film as history could have thought of this and incorporated it into his Netflix invention. Apparently entrepreneurs like Hastings only interest in media is extraction of profit from wreckage. Unfortunately the destruction of video stores seems to have been the net goal. Now that the local physical entity of movie, music, books and multi-media shops are dying or deceased, idiots like Hastings, Besos, Turner, et al can proceed to erase film history from the “inter-webs” in conjunction with the Leftist stupefaction of our universities.
Anyway, that is the gist of my RANT on the avaricious ignoramus imbeciles who have destroyed our film heritage and made it almost impossible to find and sort movie / book listings in any rational academic manner aside from pretty pictures by artists or balloon synopsis writers who may have never even seen or read the work in question.
Someone with your talent who could render Film Box Art pages of nonsense into rational text listings could put a brake on the destruction. You might provide a tool for intelligent sorting and investigation of important titles and the real artists. Not the Box Art Poster Pimps but the cast, staff, writers, historians and directors etc.
Wil – Central Indiana
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Hi Wil,
Thanks for the feedback. You raise some interesting points – I’ll have a look at this when I get chance.
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Hi Ian,
Please amend the URL format to reflect settings.
ie, part of the URL would either have b for bold or u for underline.
At the moment the settings tend to return to the default quite regularly. In my case, I keep needing to change LINK APPEARANCE from the default of bold to underlined a few times a day.
The other advantage of having it as part of the URL means that you would be able to bookmark the address so that the new settings would be retained, and any time the URL is shared, the recipient with see exactly the same page as the sender.
Thanks very much
Bruce
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Hi Bruce,
Many thanks for the feedback. I like your idea – I’ll add it to the list!
Your settings shouldn’t keep disappearing like that, though. You do have cookies enabled?
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Thanks, that sounds great!
I use textise at work, and I work for a large corporate, as you suggest, I expect that it is the cookies which are causing the problems.
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I mainly use textise to make it easier to read blogs/news/etc on a mobile device because i can set the width of the page i dont have to sidescroll for content that isnt mobile optimized. It works great for that except sometimes a page has a single string of characters that is very long, currently textise doesnt break these which can mess up page widths which then require sidescroll to read again. I would really appreciate it if there was a style option for “word-wrap:break-word;” or something similar.
An example page: https://lyenel.wordpress.com/2018/06/20/long-text/
If you textise that page while trying to use a small width the single long string of characters makes the page wider.
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Hi lyenel,
Thanks for reporting this problem. It’s something I am aware of (especially since it sometimes annoys me too!). It’s on the list for investigation; I hope to have a proper look at it quite soon.
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Hi!
That’s a fantastic site, great!
Unfortunately I can’t see text in javascript so I can’t use e.g. “zotero” 😦
Hope maybe in the future…
🙂
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Hi Renato,
Thanks for saying hello and thank you for the nice comments.
Just so that I understand, are you saying that Zotero doesn’t display text that’s in a JavaScript link? If so, you can change the way that Textise handles links on the Optins screen (https://www.textise.net/textiseOptions.aspx). Just change the Link Destination to “Plain text (no links)”. Let me know if that helps.
I hadn’t come across Zotero before so thank you also for bringing it to my attention – I think I might find it useful myself.
Ian
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Hi! I love your website and your service! I use the service on all my computers, it’s great! I know it might not interest you much, but I just discovered it doesn’t work in FIreFox 3.6 on Fedora 24 . I’m not sure if it ever worked, since I don’t remember trying it on this LInux laptop, but I thought you might at a random chance like to hear about it. Yes, I do agree: text is better in most cases! It cuts out all the ads, click-baits, and other nonsense rampant on the web. Was there a point when you didn’t use JavaScript? Sorry to ask, but being a Luddite of a sort, text-only goes hand in hand with NoScript (JavaScript disabler), so I thought I’d ask that too.
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Hi Funky Chicken,
Great to hear you’re finding Textise useful. Thank you for the kind words 🙂
When you say it doesn’t work on FF 3.6 on Fedora 24, do you mean that the site doesn’t work or the FF add-on? Let me know.
Sorry but it’s always been javascript-based. It could be amanded to work without javascript, I guess. I’ll have a think.
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It would be great if you could open links in new tab. Now its not possible because of java script.
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Hi,
Thanks for the suggestion. You won’t be surprised to know you’re not the first person to ask for this! It _is_ on the to-do list and I will try to implement soon-ish.
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7/8/2021 Question:
Does textise.net pass javascript from the site being rendered, over to the user requesting the site? I cannot determine this by experimentation so far. If textise.net does pass javascript, could this be conditionally enabled/disabled?
I am seeking “absolute minimum bandwidth” mechanism for mobile data service on my KaiOS phone (an operating system for some “feature phones”, which has nothing to do with Android) when accessing selected web sites (which do not need javascript nor graphics enabled to be useful to me). I have learned that a different browser available to install on KaiOS cannot be modified to disable image rendering due to the way it was implemented in KaiOS. Therefore, I found textise.net which solves the wish to disable graphics rendering, so I am now focused on full disable of javascript.
I am provided 200 MB – megabytes – per month of mobile data service, which is very quickly consumed by javascript and graphics rendering using the inbuilt browser of KaiOS (browser has no switches to control rendering).
So far, textise.net seems to be a valuable tool to help deal with extremely limited browser and extremely limited mobile data allocation.
I would be grateful if textise.net itself could function without javascript (the page seems simple enough I am surprised that javascript was actually required!). I saw that this request was preceded by a similar request previously; I “second” the request!
Thank you for the service provided by textise.net
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Hi Dave – thanks for saying hello.
No, Textise doesn’t retain any JS from the original page. It does have a tiny bit of its own but otherwise it’s pretty clean.
Your use case sounds interesting – we’ve had satellite phone usage I don’t think I’ve heard of Textise being used on this sort of device before.
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Hello Ian,
Thank you for the quick reply posting! It is good that javascript is not passed back – whatever javascript is part of your page itself seems to be small/lightweight, so I do not think it poses a load problem for the feature phone (at least mine, so far.)
Two other helpful (to me) feature requests, if you are in the mood/position to make an update the service:
1. A direct URL that incorporates textise.net and the target URL (for example. https://www.textise.net/nytimes.com would render nytimes.com directly as if I had entered that URL in the input bar). This would reduce the (extremely extremely) cumbersome “T9” typing needed to interact with the site. I see that the rendered URL is included as part of the rendering, but even that can be complex in some cases, which makes re-entering the whole URL “difficult” (as it is being entered on a telephone-type keyboard!)
2. An option (perhaps added to direct URL above with a change of delimiter character between http://www.textise.net and the target URL from ? to ! or something like that) to request a “quiet” rendering; this would suppress the informative text added by textise.net to the start of the rendered page (the text I am describing begins with “you have been randomly selected…” and ends with “…to add textise to your web site”.) In the rudimentary browser of the KaiOS feature phone (and probably others similarly situated), scrolling is difficult at best (repeatedly pressing a “down” button on the keypad, which makes physical noise due to the switch mechanism, and takes many many presses to get through the total amount of text involved.)
Anyway, I plan to put textise to work in my KaiOS feature phone as-is, but the changes described above would make it much more convenient to use!
Thanks again,
Dave
(and no, I am not typing this on my feature phone!)
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Hi Dave,
The direct URL _has_ been requested before so we’ll definitely consider that. Obviously, you know that links in the text-only version will take you to Textised versions of the target pages (so you don’t have to type them in)?
I can imagine that the Textise header would be painful for you in these circumstances. Are you able to use cookies on the device? If you can get to the options page, you can set the footer to put the “Textise information” at the bottom. This will move most of the header text out of your way.
Please let us know how it goes with Textise and your feature phone.
Ian
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I see the options page now, and have tested it on the desktop browser across an exit/restart of the browser. The KaiOS browser does support cookies and I think it would behave the same (I will test and advise.)
I tried to estimate the amount (bytes) of javascript generated for each page view on textise.net by looking at page source, however, there appears to be a few links that fetch javascript liibraries. Do you have any way to generate an estimate? If it is in the kilobytes range, it is probably “in the noise”, but if it is in the megabytes range, it will probably curtail my usage because the benefit accrues sufficiently only when a given page view totals in the tens of kilobytes (my 200 megabyte monthly data allocation is what drives this concern.)
So far my (very brief) experimentation verified that HTML target page links can be followed on the KaiOS device, which should avoid the need to manually follow links by URL entry.
At this point my highest priority would be direct URL; it is not a show-stopper, but it would be tremendously convenient.
I will do some more testing over the next few days and report any further findings or preferences around this use case.
Thanks again for your work on this – textise.net is so far the closest solution I’ve found!
Dave
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Hi again Ian,
I tested http://www.textise.net (just the page itself, not a rendered target page) using gtmetrix.com (I have not used any such tool before, so this was my first try.)
The URL for this transaction was:
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/textise.net/0R6I1pGZ/
Specifics for data consumption were in a formatted graphic, but here are the details in text (there are numerous details about page fetch timing and number of fetches; those were not an immediate concern of mine but you may find them interesting.)
Total page size = 75.7KB (font=37.6kb, js=30.2kb, html=3.91kb, css=3.32kb)
Javascript in the main textise.net page is not a concern for me – I can use that page only for initial set-up (with wifi) and save the rendered page URLs as (the KaiOS browser equivalent of) “favorites”.
I tried submitting several different major web news sites to gtmetrix.com, but all failed with an error 403, so I was not able to determine what overhead would be generated by textise.net in a rendered page.
For my use, the primary concern would be overhead associated with presenting the textise’d web page to the browser – in this case, javascript, fonts, and navigation/informational text generated by textise.net all would work against the intended gain potential of using textise.net as a server-side browser portal for KaiOS.
Thanks again, Ian, this is fascinating stuff and I hope you find the use case worthy of your further interest!
Dave
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Ian – one more experiment this morning (I promise!)
I took URL generated by textise.net for nytimes.com:
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=nytimes.com#site-content
and applied this to desktop PC (firefox with uBlock origin plug-in) with javascript disabled.
The result from textise.net rendered the text of the page itself (that’s good), however, links in the page were not directed back to textise.net, so that clicking a link in the rendered page sent the browser to the original form of the page (as the link was originally encoded); this would expose the KaiOS browser and mobile data allocation to a large amount of javascript, images and other undesirables, so from a practical point of view, it’s not a workable solution.
This does suggest to me that a non-Javascript version of textise.net would be non-trivial development effort, as the server-side processing would need to find and mark-up each link in the target page so that a clicked link would return to textise.net for processing (presumably each subsequent link follow would undergo the same outcome.) Whether that level of development (non-Javascript version) is worthwhile for you I cannot say, however, it would be an excellent outcome I think for this use case!
Thanks again,
Dave
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Thank you for Textise. Over 12 years of text-only web!
I notice that tags are not passed through. This can be seen in the first line of your About page https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%3A//textise.wordpress.com/about-textise/#content
The word “text” should be emphasized/italicized.
I do notice that tags are passed through.
I’m not sure what other basic html tags would be nice to pass through, but would be much appreciated!
Thanks again for years of service.
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Hi,
Many apologies for the very slow response. Somehow I managed to lose your comment for a couple of months.
With Textise, our aim was always to make the text-only output as near to plain text as possible, which is why most styling is removed. Once you start making exceptions it is – as I think you’ve already identified – difficult to know how far to go.
I’m glad you find Textise useful. 12 years?! How did that happen? 😀
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