Mozilla Readability in GNU Emacs

 

Output using Readability (left) and original eww (right)

 

Mozilla Readability is a standalone version of the readability library used for Firefox Reader View. A simple hack to eww can bring the same feature in GNU Emacs. (Note: eww already has a readable mode. This is just an alternative. Updated the post to reflect the same.)

 

- Install NodeJS 

- Install npm modules.

npm install @mozilla/readability jsdom

 

- Create a file readability.js with following content. Note the file location.

var { Readability } = require('@mozilla/readability');
var { JSDOM } = require('jsdom');
var fs = require("fs");
var str = fs.readFileSync(process.stdin.fd).toString();
var doc = new JSDOM(str);
var reader = new Readability(doc.window.document);
var article = reader.parse();
console.log(article.content);

 

 

- Modify the following function to use the file location noted above. Evaluate the function.

(defun mozilla-readability (start end)
  (shell-command-on-region start end "node <full path to readability.js>" nil t))

 

 

- Modify eww.el to use the function by adding the line below.

@@ -765,6 +768,7 @@ eww-readable
         (condition-case nil
             (decode-coding-region (point-min) (point-max) 'utf-8)
           (coding-system-error nil))
+                (mozilla-readability  (point-min) (point-max))
                 (eww--preprocess-html (point-min) (point-max))
         (libxml-parse-html-region (point-min) (point-max))))
          (base (plist-get eww-data :url)))

 

 

- Use M-x eww as you would normally do. Use R (eww-readable) to view the Firefox readable version.