There are more free resources out there today than ever before. For a student, it’s a glorious time.

Despite the rise of great annotating tools (Instapaper, Highly.co - both of which I use regularly), I still find it helpful to read and annotate on paper depending on the content.

Getting there though is surprisingly difficult as websites have de-prioritized making it simple.

Take Medium.com for example. A few years ago, Marcin Wichary wrote about designing Medium’s print experience to translate articles from the web to the page. Today, that feature doesn’t exist.

Medium’s not alone. Try printing just about any website using Ctrl+P or Cmd+P and you’ll likely be in for a bad time.

I came across a pretty simple solution though: the reader view. Reader view comes built into Safari, Firefox. On Chrome, you will need an extension - I’ve been using Reader View and enjoy it so far.

By stripping away “clutter”, these methods create clean webpages that are much simpler to print, emphasize the text, not the page styling. It also means a much nicer layout for printing - wider margins, readable font sizes (because you don’t need to resize the page), etc.

The steps

1. Load up the article, blogpost, etc. in the Reader View
2. Print
3. Enjoy reading again.

A video tutorial

I put together this 3 minute video showing how to use the Reader View in Chrome and Safari and highlighting the difference it makes for several websites.