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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

I would prefer if people would link to the normal article, not the printable page. If I want that version I can click the print link myself. If I don't want that version, I have to go search for the original location of the article.

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This was posted a few days ago. Using the normal link would flag it as a duplicate.

However, I think in most cases I'd prefer the printable version. Some articles are split up into multiple pages, and the printable version combines them and is often cleaner and faster to load.

For readability, you can always use... well... Readability: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability

People often link to the print view because the normal view is paginated. Readability won't solve pagination.

And having articles split in multiple pages with just a little text on each is more and more common (because ad revenue depends on CPM, of course). Someone should augment Readability to combine multiple pages into one.

Consider PageZipper ( http://www.printwhatyoulike.com/pagezipper ) or AutoPager ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4925 ).

In general, linking to the canonical version of an article rather than any other version helps the HN duplicate detector do its job. That is especially hard for articles from the Economist, which live under multiple URLs in different subdirectories on the Economist website. But most of those articles, as this one, are well worth submitting and good food for thought.

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