Re: Favorite Font

In comp.os.linux.misc Farley Flud <ff@linux.rocks> wrote:

On Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:56:58 -0300, Ethan Carter wrote:

>
Print?  Does anyone still print?

 
The web has become nearly intolerable.  Even the choice of font is
horrible in nearly all websites, not to mention text size, image and
ads.  It's funny how sometimes I invoke the print-friendly extension on
my browser just to read /on screen/.  But the rule is to actually print
it out.
>

 
Well, it depends on the web site.
 
A lot of sites are designed only for mobile and they are certainly
terrible.  But such sites usually contain no worthwhile information

This point is made often and I want to agree with it, but the fact
is that the websites of many ISPs are like that, so you can't
really even get on the internet anymore without some capacity for
viewing such websites (particularly annoying to people like me who
prefer lightweight web browsers which _really_ don't work with
them). Same with government websites here in Australia (I have to
enable the Referer: header to log in because the idiots depend on
that!). It's often the most essential sites that are the worst.
Sometimes I prefer to pretend I don't have internet access at all.

Then there are the various blogs that use standard blog templates
that are loaded with javascript.  Some of these blogs are worthwhile
and can be saved in the browser using the "Save Web Page Complete"
option.  This should be followed by stripping the HTML file of
all javascript and then removing all javascript and CSS files.
 
However, the best way to save web pages is to use either "wget" or "curl"
followed, again, by stripping all the javascript an CSS files.

Saving web pages with images that also load locally can be tricky
with Wget. The link rewriting with -k isn't up to facing the
complicated design of some websites. HTTtrack can struggle too,
short of spending hours tweaking its configuration. I don't like
PDFs much, so the SingleFile extension for Firefox has been handy,
it can embed images in the HTML so you just have one file. But I'd
prefer a separate program so I didn't have to run Firefox, and of
course support for downloading recursively.

 And books, of course: I print out a chapter to see if I want to
continue the reading and it's much lighter to carry a chapter than the
entire physical book.  Electronic devices are not flexible like paper
and they reflect light in a different way and you can't write on their
margins using a device that lets you feel the friction of pencil on
paper or pen on paper.  Some pens are such beautiful devices.
>
Anything interesting I find on the web I print for later reading.

 
Whew!  You must spend a fortune on ink or toner.
 
Saving web pages as described above, or printing to PDF, is the
much cheaper, and in the long term more desirable, option.  The same
applies to books.

Nah, I prefer long content printed out too. I mainly use waste
paper that's printed on one side, and old toner carts that are
too faint for important use, but still readable for text. The one
problem is that, even when I take the time to check before
printing, I still miss scrap pages that are the wrong way round
and get things printed over the top of the old text. That's damn
frustrating.

Paper costs about tripled recently in Australia when local
manufacturing wound back, so that has curtailed me a bit.

I have literally tens of thousands of web pages saved.  If I were
to physically print all of those the paper alone would weigh several
tons.

To be honest, most often I skip things online that are too long to
read comfortably on a screen, but if it's really worthwhile I'll
print it out. I even wrote software to scrape and reformat a whole
website in part just so that I could print some sections out
properly.

It would be even worse for the digital books in my collection.
Printing even a tiny fraction of those would break the foundation
of my home.

My only intention for downloading digital books is to print them,
unless I have them purely for reference to small sections. I mostly
stick to buying physical copies anyway, usually second hand.

One has to get accustomed to preserving and consuming digital data
as digital data.

The fact that I'm talking to you here means that I've tried it, but
preferences vary.

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