Columns

Read your websites more relaxed with automatic columns for wide content.Are you tired of big walls of text in articles ? Wait no more! Here comes the auto formatter for wide columns. It automatically converts big text blocks in websites into columns, which are easier and more relaxed to read. Text size is increased to 16px, which is the recommendation of w3c and designers as default font size of normal text. If a page does not display correctly because of fancy css in the design of some pages, you can always disable and enable the extension/columns by clicking on the button in the toolbar. it works without reloading the page.

you can turn off the badge-number in the options menu of the extension.

v1.16 : small bugfix
v1.15 : complete code-rewrite, now uses local-storage, you can also edit the complete css, no hidden css loaded, performance is much better. use options to customize your needs.
v1.14 : bugfix with icon turned off.
v1.13 : optimizations, added badge to show how many are changed, removed wikipedia stylesheets, maybe will make a new extension for this.
v1.12 : internal code cleanup
v1.11 : "bugfix, code was run twice, now only on (status = loaded) "
v1.10 : "bugfix, options-settings "

More details:

This plugin uses latest css3 column-width property to layout the blobs of text in paragraphs as nicely readable columns. Works with all websites, best on long boring text, eg. news articles. Screenshot of wikipedia is only one example.

The plugin has an icon to toggle the state, and keeps your current format-style for all open pages. The plugin is smart enough to detect which paragraphs to convert, eg. 1 or 2 liners are kept, if images or video/iframe (youtube) embeds are detected also the original format is kept, this way the layout looks best.

Font size is set to 16px which is good for normal reading distance, but not too big. Font is set to Verdana which works good with this column-sizes.

The first letter is a bit bigger, so one can easily detect a new row of columns.

The paragraphs are split into several columns and adopt to your browser width or the available width in the layout. most of the layout is preserved, but the readability is improved. With the toolbar-icon you can always turn back to the original layout, but after some time the new columns look normal and long lines look odd.

With extension-options you can change your preferred column-width, min-height and font-style for paragraphs.

Optimizations for Wikipedia:
* Read in columns
* navigation is on top and collapsed and shows on hover
* column width for images is optimized for column width.

PS: I am also the author of "hangout fullscreen toggle", try this new extension if you liked the old one. Also test my new extension "reddit next".