Change the appearance of Safari Reader in Safari 5.1

Sep 14, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: schutt

Safari Reader is a useful feature for making many websites more readable, but Apple doesn't provide any preference settings for Reader. Fortunately, it is easy to customize by editing the file Reader.html.

In Safari 5.0 it was easy to edit a file in the Safari.app package to set the preferences. In Safari 5.1, the file was moved to a non-obvious place:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Reader.html

You can simply edit the stylesheet in this file to change the appearance of Reader. Any changes will apply to tabs that Safari Reader has not yet been used in, just open a new tab to see the new style. As always, be careful when editing system files, and make a backup of Reader.html first. Be aware that some of the styles appear to be overwritten before you see them. For example, changing the size of the body font has no effect. If you want to change the size of the typeface, you can use the zoom trick.

More details and examples, and a faster way to make the changes are in the expanded instructions.

Since Apple is likely to continue overwriting Reader.html with each update, I created a patch file for my changes. This can be applied using the patch command, as explained in the full version of this hint from the link above.

[crarko adds: I'm not a big user of Safari Reader, but it's good to have the ability to customize it. As the author points out on his site, Readability is also still an option for Safari 5.1, if you're not comfortable making the changes for yourself. Definitely read the examples of changes to the stylesheet if you haven't done this before.]

Comments (2)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20110907073455156