HACKER Q&A
📣 neonnoodle

I hate vertical scrolling. How can I paginate the web?


My eyes get messed up by scrolling long pieces of text. I like reading long stuff on the internet, so I often print to PDF, but this is an extra step and frequently breaks or is ugly and LESS readable where print.css isn’t well-designed. Is there some way to extract the rendered DOM and break it into discrete screen-size pages that I can flip through instead of scrolling?


  👤 Brajeshwar Accepted Answer ✓
Recently, I re-designed my blog and I went looking for a Print CSS starter framework. I found a nice, simple, lean one -- Gutenberg[1]. It is less than 5KB before zipping.

I hope people still do print.css. I also have a habit of printing interesting articles to read away from the screen.

1. https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg


👤 arrmn
Page up/Page down buttons?

Maybe try the vimium extension, d/u jumps half a page down/up


👤 jve
You may try Immersive Reading on Edge. Reading preferences has Line Focus mode. Maybe that helps. Then you can use arrows up/down to focus next lines and so on.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-immersive-read...


👤 Leftium
This bookmarklet marks where the bottom of the page was when you press space to page-down[1]

I modified it so the marker is not a red line, but a transparent gray block marking the part of the page you've already seen. (Sometimes I couldn't find the red line before it fades away, and I find the gray block less distracting.)

Then I added it to ViolentMonkey (user script) so it's always activated without having to click the bookmarklet.

[1]: https://github.com/phuhl/bookmarklets#scroll-better-with-the...


👤 garyfirestorm
Use Instapaper It allows pagination I used to bookmark articles of interest to pinboard.in and then ifttt would automatically move them to Instapaper where you could even read them offline on a flight.

👤 exikyut
You could try disabling Smooth Scrolling in chrome://flags then scrolling using the arrow keys. If that works, there's tons of "better" smooth-scrolling bits of JS gunk out there that try and trap the browser scroll mechanics and do horrible things to it; you could look at these scripts for ideas about how to correctly eat scroll events, and then build something that breaks the scroll process up into "steps". Yep, I'm basically describing making scrolling more choppy - on the theory that there might be a "jump" size that's Just Right™ for your eyes/brain.

Another possibility could be setting your reading font to OpenDyslexic: https://opendyslexic.org/ (or the $$$ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/)

Yet another could be installing BeeLine reader, which highlights lines of text using progressive gradients: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...


👤 johnday
Use the page-down key?

👤 Urgo
Not sure if this helps but what I do quite often (and have ever since I can remember) is press the middle click button on my mouse to activate mouse scroll mode and drag the mouse down ever so slightly so it's a super smooth, super slow scroll.

👤 chrisjc
Not related entirely related but...

What I hate most about vertical scrolling, and specifically infinite scroll is when you click through to a segment, and then navigate back you're now back to the top where you started.

I get around this by opening every segment in a new tab, but what an annoyance.


👤 jenshk
Sounds like a chrome extension. I don't know if there is one that does exactly that

👤 hdjjhhvvhga
Do yourself a favor and avoid tiny 6/7 inches e-readers, especially if you intend to read PDF papers.

👤 brador
Try a different display technology. OLED, higher refresh rate, top of the line tablet.

👤 cromulent
You might be able to find (or build) a Greasemonkey script to do this.

👤 xx511134bz
Run it through outline.com if it has a bad print.css

👤 the-dude
Press

👤 throwawayswede
can't you print pdf from reader view? FF reader view is pretty good imo...

👤 teddyh
Print Preview?

👤 yarcob
Instapaper.