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Comment by jaytaylor | Hacker News Reader

After seeing the CNN one and now this, it makes me want to create a generalized service to turn any site into TXT format with the html2text [0] golang package.

Will submit to Show HN if I get enough round toits ;)

[0] https://github.com/jaytaylor/html2text

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Here is the first pass; I still want to make it fancier so that links are clickable, but for a quick first stab I'm pleasantly surprised with the output quality:

http://txt.gigawatt.io/ <-- add URL here at the end (GET parameters not yet supported)

Examples:

http://txt.gigawatt.io/jaytaylor.com

http://txt.gigawatt.io/http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/26/politic...

Source code: https://github.com/jaytaylor/txt-web

I get mojibake when looking at my personal site: http://txt.gigawatt.io/christine.website/blog/voiding-the-in...

Yes, that'll be fixed when I move to a text-based HTML output instead of raw plaintext.

Thanks for the feedback and for trying it out!

Most browsers already have a “reader view”.

On a tablet, I sometimes make use of this site:

https://www.textise.net/

It comes in pretty handy sometimes. I'm absolutely not affiliated, just a happy user.

Thank you for that. A very useful website.

I bet you can use one of the classic text “browsers”, like Lynx, and serve up that output...

...Runs to download Lynx and rediscover the past!

elinks -dump is my poison of choice :)

here's hoping!

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