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Ask HN: I hate vertical scrolling. How can I paginate the web?

34 points by neonnoodle ↗ HN
My eyes get messed up by scrolling long pieces of text. I like reading long stuff on the internet, so I often print to PDF, but this is an extra step and frequently breaks or is ugly and LESS readable where print.css isn’t well-designed. Is there some way to extract the rendered DOM and break it into discrete screen-size pages that I can flip through instead of scrolling?

31 comments

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jenshk
Sounds like a chrome extension. I don't know if there is one that does exactly that
theginger
Id consider using one that does the opposite. I hate pagination, I can't just click back once I'm 3 pages in, often it feels to me like it is there to drive click rates.
johnday
Use the page-down key?
mkl
Or the space key, which is easier to reach out for (shift-space to go back up).
q-rews
I just tried it, it messes up* on the last page so you have to find where you where again.

* If the last page should only be one paragraph, the browser might not be able scroll down enough to only include only that paragraph.

netmare
This has been ruining my reading experience on the web for years. I remember fondly an old Opera version (10-15 years ago) that would briefly display a dotted line on page up/down to mark the boundary between pages. It was such an amazingly useful little addition. I don't recall whether it was built-in or an extension, I just remember the disappointment when I couldn't use it any more (either they disabled or it was the time I switched to Firefox).
neonnoodle
Oh man. I wish I had that. Opera was so great (running Vivaldi now fwiw)
cromulent
You might be able to find (or build) a Greasemonkey script to do this.
arrmn
Page up/Page down buttons?

Maybe try the vimium extension, d/u jumps half a page down/up

pdw
Disabling smooth scrolling in your browser settings will make Page Up/Down feel more like real pagination
jve
You may try Immersive Reading on Edge. Reading preferences has Line Focus mode. Maybe that helps. Then you can use arrows up/down to focus next lines and so on.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/use-immersive-read...

q-rews
Wow, that is amazing. The picture dictionary is incredibly useful when learning a language and it's the first time I see it, in a general-purpose tool too!

When learning a language I have to keep a dictionary, Google Translate, and Google Images open at the same time, and it's frustrating to find that neither language tool includes direct access to the other 2.

jve
As of translate... You may find out that https://deepl.com is useful. When translating to Latvian (2M+ perhaps talk this language), it gives better results than Google Translate.
jeroenhd
I've been using deepl myself, but it's not always great for translating text to another language.

At some point I translated an English email to French and the Deepl translation translated "regards" to the French equivalent of something close to "I hope you appreciate, mister president, my distinguished salutations". It's probably based on official documents from parties like the UN and the EU that have many if not all documents translated to all member languages, so that was a very interesting bias to spot.

garyfirestorm
Use Instapaper It allows pagination I used to bookmark articles of interest to pinboard.in and then ifttt would automatically move them to Instapaper where you could even read them offline on a flight.
Brajeshwar
Recently, I re-designed my blog and I went looking for a Print CSS starter framework. I found a nice, simple, lean one -- Gutenberg[1]. It is less than 5KB before zipping.

I hope people still do print.css. I also have a habit of printing interesting articles to read away from the screen.

1. https://github.com/BafS/Gutenberg

ghostDancer
Depends on the size but if it's big, I tend to convert them into epub/mobi to read on a ebook.
exikyut
You could try disabling Smooth Scrolling in chrome://flags then scrolling using the arrow keys. If that works, there's tons of "better" smooth-scrolling bits of JS gunk out there that try and trap the browser scroll mechanics and do horrible things to it; you could look at these scripts for ideas about how to correctly eat scroll events, and then build something that breaks the scroll process up into "steps". Yep, I'm basically describing making scrolling more choppy - on the theory that there might be a "jump" size that's Just Right™ for your eyes/brain.

Another possibility could be setting your reading font to OpenDyslexic: https://opendyslexic.org/ (or the $$$ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/)

Yet another could be installing BeeLine reader, which highlights lines of text using progressive gradients: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj...

throwawayswede
can't you print pdf from reader view? FF reader view is pretty good imo...
chrisjc
Not related entirely related but...

What I hate most about vertical scrolling, and specifically infinite scroll is when you click through to a segment, and then navigate back you're now back to the top where you started.

I get around this by opening every segment in a new tab, but what an annoyance.

hdjjhhvvhga
Do yourself a favor and avoid tiny 6/7 inches e-readers, especially if you intend to read PDF papers.
brador
Try a different display technology. OLED, higher refresh rate, top of the line tablet.
xx511134bz
Run it through outline.com if it has a bad print.css
Urgo
Not sure if this helps but what I do quite often (and have ever since I can remember) is press the middle click button on my mouse to activate mouse scroll mode and drag the mouse down ever so slightly so it's a super smooth, super slow scroll.
Leftium
This bookmarklet marks where the bottom of the page was when you press space to page-down[1]

I modified it so the marker is not a red line, but a transparent gray block marking the part of the page you've already seen. (Sometimes I couldn't find the red line before it fades away, and I find the gray block less distracting.)

Then I added it to ViolentMonkey (user script) so it's always activated without having to click the bookmarklet.

[1]: https://github.com/phuhl/bookmarklets#scroll-better-with-the...

neonnoodle
Fantastic! This is extremely helpful, thank you.