Save Online Articles To Read Later in Safari

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can save articles to read later in Safari. 

Sometimes when you're browsing the web you come across an article that you want to read but you don't have time to read it right now. You want to save it for later. You might be tempted to bookmark that webpage. But bookmarking is more for when you permanently want to save that page so you can go back to it over and over again. If you just want to read something later then a better choice is the Safari Reading List. 

Here I am in Safari and I'm looking at an article and I want to save it to read later. The way to do that is to go to Bookmarks, but instead of adding a bookmark go to Add To Reading List. Note the keyboard shortcut is Shift Command D. I'm going to add this to the Reading List and you can see that it kind of disappears into the Sidebar here. I can show the Sidebar by clicking here. If I look at the bottom I'll see Reading List. If I click that I'll see my Reading List including the article I just saved. 

A quicker way to get there is usually to go to View and then Show Reading List Sidebar or Control Command 2. If you choose that it brings you not to just the Sidebar but instead of showing new bookmarks or some other section of the Sidebar, it always takes you right to the Reading List.

So let's say later on I see another article and I want to add that one as well. I'll use Shift Command and D to add it to the Reading List. Then maybe here's a third page. I'll use Shift Command D to save that as well. Now I'll use Control Command 2 to bring up the Reading List and I can see all three of those articles there. 

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There are other ways to add to the Reading List. For instance, you can Control Click, right click, or two-finger click on a trackpad on a Link. One of the options here is to Add the Link to the Reading List. But you can also just hold the Shift Key down and then click and now Add To The Reading List as well. Another way to add is when you're on a webpage you can use the Share Button here or File, Share and one of the options here is Add To Reading List. 

Now you can View the Reading List here in the left Sidebar. There are actually two modes here. If I were to use two-fingers on my Trackpad or one on a magic mouse, scroll down, you can see the modes are All, for all of the articles in your Reading List or just the Unread ones. Once you select one here and then read through it, it's going to mark it as read. It won't show here, in this mode, but all your articles will show here. Also, notice there's Search here at the top. So if your Reading List gets long you can Search by something in the title, or URL. For instance I can find all of the Wikipedia articles by searching. 

There's one other way to get to your Reading List. If you go to your Start Page, and you may have it set as your Homepage so you see it all the time,  one of the sections here is Reading List. If I click Edit at the bottom right I can customize this. If I'm just interested in seeing the Reading List here I can uncheck everything but Reading List and then my Start Page turns into a Reading List page. When you're done with something and you want to remove it from the Reading List you can bring up the Context Menu and use Delete here to delete that item. But you can use two-fingers on a trackpad or one on a mouse and swipe to the left to reveal buttons here. One of them is Remove. If you swipe the other direction you can mark something as Read or Unread. So it will or will not appear in the Unread section. You can also Control Click on the Start Page and you can Delete there as well to remove something from the Reading List. 

Now that's how to add and maintain your Reading List. But how do you actually read the articles? Well, if you select one here, like this one, it simply loads the page up again like if you were using a bookmark. But there are a couple of interesting aspects. One is that if you scroll through this article and get all the way to the bottom and then push past the bottom you actually end up in the next article on the list. It actually works out as a continuous scroll. I can do the same thing by scrolling back up. I can scroll to the previous article. Then all the way to the top. So you can use your Reading List as one long continuous page. 

Now there's another feature in Safari with the word Read in it. That's Reader or Reader View. You can find it by going to View, and then Show Reader. This works on any page that is mostly an article. Pages with lots of graphics or videos and stuff won't have this feature but articles will. You can use this menu command, or Shift Command R, to go into Reader View which looks like this. It just gets rid of a lot of the distractions and leaves you with the text. You can customize Reader View by clicking here at the top. Now you can choose a basic theme, like this. You can choose from different fonts. You can zoom more, like that. Also use this to Exit Reader View. This makes it a lot easier to read articles. Notice that if I now scroll past the bottom of this article here, the next one appears in Reader View as well. 

If you Mac is compatible with Apple Intelligence and you have it enabled, you may also see some other things here. Like a Table of Contents with Links and a Summarize feature that summarizes the article using AI. 

Now in any webpage you can go to Edit, Speech and have it start speaking the contents of the page. But usually there are so many different elements in a webpage it doesn't make sense. But once you have Reader View enabled then using Start Speaking will produce a better result. If you like you can actually select text and then use the Context Menu here and then Speech, Start Speaking to just speak that section. So you can skip over portions of it if you like. 

Now a special feature of the Reading List is the ability to save an article to view it Offline. Notice if I swipe to the left here not only do I get a Remove Button but a Save Offline Button there. The idea is then that this article will be cached and if I'm disconnected from the internet I can still go to my Reading List, select it here, and I can read the article. There's even a setting to make this the Default. Go into Safari, Settings, go to Advanced, and then right here you've got Save Articles for Offline Reading automatically. So now you don't have to remember to select that. Anything added to your Reading List is going to be available Offline. 

Another big feature of Reading List is it works over iCloud. So as long as you have Safari enabled with iCloud on all your devices adding an article to the Reading List on one device means it will show up on the other. So on your iPhone to get to your Reading List you would tap the Bookmark Button there and you can see there are three sections here. You've got Bookmarks, on the right is History, and in the middle there you've got glasses that represent the Reading List. Select that and then you can see the different articles that you've saved there synced across using iCloud. You've got Show Unread here. You've can swipe to the left and to the right, just like you can on the Mac. You can also select Edit here to select some. Then Delete. You've got the Save Offline option. When you're reading you have the ability to tap here to the left side of the address bar and you can switch to Reader View, just like on the Mac. Then tap here again and you have all the different options for fonts and themes. Then there's a handy button here to actually have the pages spoken to you, just like on the Mac as well. 

Adding something to the Reading List is a matter of tapping on the Share Button here and then one of the options is Add to Reading List. But you can also tap and hold a link and you'll find Add to Reading List is an option in there as well. 

Now there are a lot of third party apps out there that let you save articles for offline reading and one of the things that they all have, that you don't really have with the Reading List, is Organization. You can't group them. You can't put them in Folders or anything like that. But there are alternatives. For instance, you can use Bookmarks instead if you don't mind not having them saved for offline view then you can create bookmarks, create folders for your bookmarks and organize as you like. Even changing the titles to match what you might be searching for later. Also remember here at the top you've got Search. Search can act as a substitute for organization. Just let the list accumulate articles and use Search later to find something from a particular site or to search for a term, or look for a keyword. Remember you always have the option to save an article outside of Safari. You can go to File, and you can Export as a PDF, for instance. But also note that if you go to Reader View and then you do the same thing then you're going to get a Reader View version of that as a PDF. 

So here's that first PDF here and here is the Reader View version of the PDF. If you want something to look exactly like it does on the web you can always go to File, Save As and then set the Format to Save As A Web Archive. So here is the web archive of this and you can see it looks exactly like the page.

Personally, I use Reading List when I know I want to go back to a webpage to read something and then I'm probably going to be done with it. If I know I want to save it and refer back to it many times in the future I'll save a Bookmark. But you don't always have to decide right away. You can save something to the Reading List, go back to read it, and then bookmark it after you decide you want to keep the article around longer. If the webpage is something I really want to keep as is permanently, then I will save it usually as a PDF. So as you can see Safari gives you a variety of tools to save webpages as you like depending on the situation. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.