Please Stop Using Grey Text
First, the experience of this article is vastly improved by reading it through Scribe, an alternate front end along the lines of Nitter, Invidious, Bibliogram, and Teddit:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scribe.rip&#x2F;please-stop-using-grey-text-3d3e71acfca8?gi=70cf8da7ece8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scribe.rip&#x2F;please-stop-using-grey-text-3d3e71acfca8?...</a><p>(Or your browser&#x27;s Reader Mode, if available.)<p>Secondly:  as someone who&#x27;s switched almost wholly to e-ink for online reading[1], the greyed-out text, or worse still, grey-on-grey experience is all the more aggrevating.[2]<p>Fortunately for me, reading on my BOOX with Firefox, reader mode addresses the colour and font-face issues.  Leaving me with a remaining third problem:  scrolling.<p>Touch-based scrolling through a document on mobile devices is itself a horrendous experience, and e-ink&#x27;s latency makes this worse.<p>At the highest display quality, scrolling causes the display to &quot;shatter&quot; into a sandstorm of pixels until movement is stopped.  Given the nondeterministic nature of scrolling, trying to pick up where the original end-point of text was, and continue reading is ... difficult at best.  Reducing image quality at least gets rid of the sandstorm effect (at a cost of display quality and increased ghosting), but scrolling <i>remains</i> uneven.<p>An alternate browser, Einkbro, which has numerous e-ink optimisations, features <i>pagninated</i> navigation.  Specific zones of the screen (my preference is lower right &amp; left for next&#x2F;previous) will navigate by (nearly) a full page, deterministically (I leave about a 10% overlap for continuity).  It&#x27;s <i>still</i> not as good as a fully-paginated document, as with PDF-based e-books, but it&#x27;s worlds better than scrolling.<p>I&#x27;ve been noticing how annoying online reading is for many reasons (ads, sidebar clutter, animations, and more), and was beginning to wonder if that was intrinsic to me or my device itself.  Re-reading a 500 page novel this past week, on the device, I realised that no, it&#x27;s mostly Web design &#x2F; Web browser &#x2F; Android interactions themselves, and that e-books are a vastly superior long-form format.<p>Even tools such as Pocket which offer a &quot;page flip&quot; mode turn out to be a horrendous UI&#x2F;UX in comparison:<p>- The flipping is gesture, not region based.<p>- Application features such as highlighting and tagging are not available in page-flip mode.  It&#x27;s necessary to scroll slightly to expose these.<p>- Pagination is not fixed for the document, but is arbitrary depending on your position within the document when you initiated flip mode.<p>Consequence:  I rarely use Pocket for reading.
Einkbro has one further trick up its sleeve, however:  &quot;save as ePub&quot;.<p>Yes, you can save as PDF, which should be familiar from other browsers.  As with these, the result is a statically-formatted document with fonts poorly-selected for static reading, page-clutter from the online experience, lines cut off between pages and running into both side and vertical margins and gutters, and a pile of increasingly-difficult-to-navigate single documents.<p>Save-as-ePub:[6]<p>- Largely succeeds in stripping out all non-main-body text from the article.<p>- Standardises fonts to your ePub defaults.<p>- Formats vertical and side margins.  (I&#x27;d prefer these could be made larger, that&#x27;s actually the fault of my e-book reader.)<p>- Permits annotations of the document directly:  highlighting, bookmarking, and both typed and handwritten annotations.<p>- The kicker:  <i>Compiling multiple Web articles into a single ePub book.</i>  This might be a set of articles on a specific topic, on a date (or date range), material for a project, to be sent to a colleague, friend, or family member, etc.<p>There are limitations , but it is <i>transformational</i> and uncannily brilliant.  It also highlights that a tremendous problem with the Web is its very Webbyness.<p>Einkbro has several other highly-useful features:<p>- Font scaling <i>ON THE MAIN TOOLBAR ITSELF</i>.  Not buried four levels deep within menus as in Firefox, or entirely nonexistant as with Chrome.<p>- A &quot;White Background&quot; toggle, which <i>mostly</i> works.
- A good &quot;Reader Mode&quot; feature, though IMO inferior to Firefox&#x27;s.  I&#x27;m often caught between Firefox&#x27;s better reader mode and Einkbro&#x27;s better navigation, at which point save-to-ePub is usually the best alternative.<p>- Various interface quirks which have my relying on Firefox more for content <i>discovery</i> (often through HN), and Einkbro for long-form <i>reading</i>.<p>But it&#x27;s an excellent browser and if you&#x27;re on an e-ink device, or even a tablet, I strongly recommend it.<p>But yeah, the further I can get from a site&#x27;s own design and styling, in general, the better.<p>________________________________<p>Notes:<p>1. Exception:  when I&#x27;m commenting on specific sites and services, as one of my accomodations is to <i>not</i> have any account-based services on my e-ink reader, so yes, this is being typed on a colourised &amp; emissive older tablet.<p>2. &quot;Night mode&quot; defaults are also exceptionally bad.  TFA&#x27;s choice of an exceedingly grapey-purple background renders as grey-on-black, which ... is pretty bad itself.  Worse still are colour combinations of similar luminosity (say, red-green or red-blue) in which all distinction between text and background is lost.  Even my own take on the &quot;Motherfucking Website&quot; motif, which tends to render well on most colour-emissive devices, is suboptimal on e-ink.  I should add  a @media query based on available colour depth and toggle colours to maximal contrast for e-ink.  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;full&#x2F;KpMqqB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;codepen.io&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;full&#x2F;KpMqqB</a><p>3. Fonts matter.  A lot.  At 220 dpi, i much prefer serif to sans.<p>4. There are many other reasons for this, mind, I&#x27;m just referring to the navigation &#x2F; interaction aspects.  My years&#x27; old gripe list remains largely current, though there&#x27;s been some small progress:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5x2sfx&#x2F;pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;5x2sfx&#x2F;pocket_...</a><p>5. Expanded at length here:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toot.cat&#x2F;@dredmorbius&#x2F;107958709435468728" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;toot.cat&#x2F;@dredmorbius&#x2F;107958709435468728</a><p>6. I&#x27;ve had a lengthy GitHub discussion with the developer:  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plateaukao&#x2F;browser&#x2F;issues&#x2F;107" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;plateaukao&#x2F;browser&#x2F;issues&#x2F;107</a>