Feature request: Save webpages in reader mode

oplatek

Hi all,

I really like reading webpages in Google Reader mode[1]. The reader mode is also available in Safari[2].

However, when using the Google Reader mode I am not able to save the webpage to Zotero.

It is a pity because this is exactly how I imagine how the webpage should be saved.

Is it possible to make the Google Chrome reader mode compatible with Zotero?
or
Is it possible that Zotero would process the webpages in a similar manner as Google Chrome reader mode before saving the webpage?

Thank you for Zotero - it is an amazing piece of software!

Ondra

[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/423643/how-to-use-google-chromes-hidden-reader-mode/
[2] https://www.macworld.com/article/3206708/how-to-use-reader-mode-in-safari-11.html

dstillman

The Zotero Connector for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge will save the page exactly as it appears in your browser, so if you use a third-party extension to clean up the page, Zotero will save that.

The Safari extension has the older version of Zotero snapshots that don't reflect any in-browser modifications to the page, so third-party extensions won't help there at the moment.

Extensions can't run on the native reader-mode pages in Chrome or Firefox, and the same is almost certainly true in Safari as well.

We've talked in the past about offering a reader-mode option for snapshots in Zotero, but the new, more stable snapshots we rolled out last year make it somewhat less of a priority. Now that we can save pages as modified by other extensions, I'm fairly inclined to leave this to others, but if there's open-source code that works well we could explore integrating it (as we did with SingleFile for snapshots).

(Also, I should add that I'm not totally sure how the popular reader-mode extensions work. If they actually remove content from the page structure, it could break saving high-quality metadata to Zotero, but if they only hide it from display, that'd be fine.)

oplatek

Hi! Thank you for the tips.

I have tried to make Zotero work with the first most popular reader-mode extension offered in the Google Chrome extension "store".

I used https://add0n.com/chrome-reader-view.html
It displayed the webpage quite ok for me, but I was not able to save it to Zotero.
The webpage link changed to "chrome-extension://ecabifbgmdmgdllomnfinbmaellmclnh/data/reader/index.html?id=2348&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zotero.org%2Fsupport%2Finstallation" after I enabled the reader-mode. I used for demonstration the zotero.org installation page. Note, that I wanted to include a screenshot but do not know how to do it here on the forum.


Right now I am looking into any working solution, ie most probably a reader-mode extension compatible with Zotero.

Any tips?

Thank you!

dstillman

Yeah, that wouldn't work — you'd need something that modified the page in-place, not at its own extension URL.