Make Web Articles Easier To Read With Safari Reader View

Reader View is a great way to read large amounts of text on a web page. Get rid of distractions like ads, navigation and sidebars, and read with larger text on a plain background. You can also use Reader View for nicer printouts, PDFs and text features.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how Reader View in Safari can make it easier to read articles online. 
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So Reader View has been around in Safari for many years. But I know it can be easy to forget it's there. Even I forget sometimes and end up just reading an article on a regular webpage. But with Reader View you can really focus on the text and get rid of a lot of the ads and other distractions on a page. 
Let's say you're on a webpage like this. One that's mostly a text article. In most cases if you look up here in the Address Bar you'll see this little icon here that indicates Reader View. As a matter of fact if you put your pointer over it you can see how it says Show Reader View there. It's going to look a little different if you're in the Compact Tabs View and I'll show you that in a minute. But when you do see this icon it just means that Safari has recognized that this page is mostly an article and it is giving you this button to easily switch to Reader View. But you don't need to have this button here. You can also go to the View Menu and then use Show Reader, or the keyboard shortcut Shift Command R. As a matter of fact this will work on pages even if you don't see this icon. For instance here on the MacMost About page Safari doesn't feel that this is a long enough article to warrant that button. So it is not there. But you can still go to Reader View, by using View, Show Reader View or the keyboard shortcut. 
Let's turn On Reader View here with the button and you can see what it looks like. It kind of looks like a piece of paper with even a shadow around it. It just takes the text from the article and uses some formatting like it recognizes Headings, for instance, and makes them larger. It will also show links in blue. It will show things that are bolded and italicized and other styles. For the most part it makes everything kind of a uniform font. Makes it very easy to read. You can notice that the text size is usually quite a bit larger than what you see on the webpage. It is very easy to scroll through it and read the article without all the distractions. In most cases you won't see the ads. You won't see navigation elements or links to other articles. Things like that. 
In addition if you look at the top, in the Address Bar, you'll see this little button that's a small and large letter A. That's the Reader Appearance Option button. You can click that and it will reveal this little panel here that will allow you to increase or decrease the font size. You can change the background color, like that. You can choose from a variety of fonts to make it easier to read text on your screen. So choose whichever one you think is best. 
To exit Reader View you can click this button again or you can use the View Menu or the Keyboard Shortcut. You can also just click outside of this virtual piece of paper here. Like click in this area and it will exit. 
Also note that Reader View obeys Dark and Light Mode. So if I go up to Control Center here and under Display I turn on Dark Mode notice how Reader View reacts nicely to this. 
Let's switch to the Compact Tab View. I'll go into Safari Settings and under Tabs I'll switch to Compact. You can see it looks a little different here at the top. I don't see a button here to switch to Reader View. However, you can still click the three dots button here. One of the Options you'll see is Reader View. Of course you can still use the View Menu option and the keyboard shortcut to switch into Reader View. Notice here in Reader View I do get this icon indicating it and I can click it to dismiss Reader View. I can also click the three dots button, when in Reader View, and choose Reader Appearance and it brings up the Controls as before. 
Note that when you're in Reader View you don't necessarily need to use this button here and these two buttons at the top to adjust the size. You can actually use the standard View Menu, Zoom In and Zoom Out options here. The keyboard shortcuts are Command Plus or Minus. So Command + makes the font   bigger and minus makes it smaller. If you make it much bigger you can use Command and zero to go back to the default size.
Moving through a document in Reader View can be as simple as just using the same scrolling gestures on a trackpad or on the surface of a mouse to scroll up and down. But you can use keyboard shortcuts as well. The down arrow key will move down approximately one or two lines.  The up arrow as well. Use the Option Key and down you'll go approximately one page. Option Up to go up one page. Then the Command Key and down go to the end or Command and Up to go to the top. You can also use the Page Up and Page Down buttons or Home and End buttons if you have a keyboard that has those. If you don't you can use the fn or Globe Key and fn and Down goes down a page and Up goes up a page. fn and right goes to the end and fn and left goes Home.
There are a variety of different things you can do when you're in Reader Mode. You can, for instance, select text just like you can anywhere else. With that text selected you can Control Click, two-finger click on a trackpad, or right click on a mouse, and then you can bring up the Context Menu. Here you can do various things. Like you can look up words, you can use the translation feature, and you can also use Speech and start speaking and have it speak text to you. It is often easier to use these in Reader View than it is looking at the regular webpage because sometimes selecting text on the regular webpage gives you text you don't want. Maybe navigation elements and such. Whereas here you can just focus on the article text. 
Another great thing you can do with Reader View is get cleaner printouts for articles. So if I go back to the regular webpage here and I use File, and then Print, I can see a preview here of what the page looks like. So it looks basically like the article does on the regular web. However, if I were to go into Reader View first and then go to File, Print I get a printout that looks a lot like Reader View. That's going to be a lot easier on my printer ink for one thing. Maybe it is easier to read on paper as well. It will even obey the settings you've got here. So I can go into the Settings. Let's make the font size a lot smaller and change the font to maybe put this background here. Now if go to File, and then Print you can see it doesn't bother with the background. But it is making the font smaller and in the right font choice according to our settings. 
You can also use this to save as PDF. Either go into File, Print and then click the PDF button or you can just go to File and then Export as PDF.  The PDF you're going to get is going to look like the Reader View version, not the webpage version.
Reader View also makes copying and pasting easier. If I were to select text like this it is not going to maybe accidentally select other parts of the webpage, like navigational elements. I could Copy and Paste into another document and get something a little cleaner. 
Notice how the Reader View version of this page didn't include the image. But that is not always true. For instance if I go to this news story here notice how there are ads, there are navigation elements and all sorts of things. But also some images. If I use Reader View I don't get all the ads or navigational elements but I do get some of the images. How it looks exactly is going to vary from website to website. Some websites may have articles that fit really well with Reader View. While others have confusing elements and Reader View doesn't show you the whole article, maybe doesn't grab the picture or maybe grabs elements that you think shouldn't included. 
You also have the ability to set a website to Always Be Seen in Reader View. So, for instance, here I'm in Wikipedia. Let's go to Safari, Settings and I'm going to go to Websites. The first item here on the left is Reader. Select that. It's going to show you any sites where you can change the default for Reader View. Or any sites that you currently have opened. You see I have these 3 tabs open. Let's, for Wikipedia, set this to On. You also have the ability here, when visiting other websites to choose On or Off. I highly recommend you use OFF. The reason for that is sometimes you could be missing important parts of the webpage if you only see them in Reader View. The best experience is to read the webpage first, see what is there, and then when you know you want to read just the text of the article then go into Reader View.
So now that we've got Wikipedia set to always On, notice how this article here is going to show Reader View. I can easily still switch out of it. If I go to the main Wikipedia page, if I choose any article like, say, this one here you can see how it automatically switches into Reader View. I can still turn it Off if I want to see the regular page. 
 
Other web browsers have similar things. For instance there's the Reader View in Firefox. But of course it is a different browser so you're going to get different results when you use this Reader View. Chrome, of course, is made by Goggle which makes most of its money through web advertising. So Reader View really isn't in its best interest. But it does have a mode that if you go to the 3 dots button at the top right you can go to More Tools and then you can turn on Reading Mode. It doesn't get rid of the webpage. So you still see ads and other things here on the majority of the page. But it does give you this little Reader View to the right side of that. So you can focus on the text over here, change the font sizes and other things.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Make Web Articles Easier To Read With Safari Reader View”

Sheldon

8 months ago

Thanks bunches

Barry

7 months ago

I love reader view and your tips will make it even more useful. Thanks.

However, lately I have noticed that a growing number of web-pages do not respond to reader view. Is this due to a setting that I have, mistakenly, applied? Or... can some web pages be designed to thwart reader view?

Gary Rosenzweig

Barry: Neither. It is just that the page is poorly coded so Safari can't figure out what the article portion is.