SUMMARY

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.

v1.19: cleanup code. removed customization of stylesheet, use another extension if you want to do this.
v1.18 : migrate to manifest v3
v1.16 : small bugfix


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.

The latest version of Columns is available on the Chrome web and is currently being used by 426 active users. The initial version was launched on 2015-02-03.

HOW TO INSTALL Columns FROM A CRX FILE

1. Download Columns CRX file
2. NOTE: Sometimes the browser may block downloading / installing CRX file from outside the Chrome Web Store. If so, you may need to download the ZIP file instead
3. In the URL bar, go to chrome://extensions
4. Enable Developer mode

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