What is Columns?
Columns is a accessibility chrome extension. it's a free extension and is featured in Accessibility, it has 400 active users since released its first version, it earns an average rating of 3.18 from 17 rated user, last update is 806 days ago.
What’s new in version 1.19?
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.
How to install Columns?
You could download the latest version crx file or older version files and install it.
Preview of Columns
Technical Features:
- Latest Version: 1.19
- Requirements: Windows Chrome, Mac Chrome
- License: Free
- Latest update: Monday, August 22nd, 2022
- Author: Unterberger.Media
Columns Available languages:
English.
FAQ
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What about others talk about columns chrome extension?
27% user give 5-star rating, 36% user give 4-star rating, 18% user give 3-star rating, 18% user give 2-star rating. Read reviews of columns
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How could i get help if there is something wrong with columns chrome extension?
You could find more help information from columns support page.
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How could i contact the developer of columns chrome extension?
You could send emails to publisher, or check publisher's website.
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What are the required permissions for extensions?
- storage
- http://*/*
- https://*/*
More about manifest_file of columns.
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How could i report abuse of columns chrome extension?
You could click to report abuse of columns.
Reviews of columns:
I appreciate this because it got me thinking of possibilities, but it could use simpler feature options for the layman, like characters or word per line.. that kind of thing.
It makes reading easier. Thank u.
okay for Wikipedia. However is there a way to make it work on the google.com search results? I could not find a way to do that.