TechTip: Better Printing for Your Pocket Articles (using Firefox and Stylish)

I will be honest, Pocket is hands down my favorite "Read Later" app, mostly because it's natively available on my Kobo eReader. I can save internet articles from Firefox, Mobile or Twitter (using IFTTT) and read them later on a comfortable front-lit eInk screen. In fact, this is how I do most of my catching up on the information security industry happenings, and choose what to later print out into a PDF for long time archiving and sharing.

This is where the pet peeve of mine comes in. In an effort to be more readable, Pocket adjusts the width of the reformatted article in its web interface to something like 700 pixels:

This makes it great to read in the browser, but when you print the page (into PDF, for example), it ends up looking like a printout for ants:

The Fix

Fixing this is surprising easy, especially if you already use Stylish in your Firefox:

1. If you don't already have this useful add-on , go out and install Stylish
2. Go into "Manage Add-Ons" menu (or press Ctrl+Shift+A) in Firefox and click on "User Styles"
   
   
   
   
3. Click "Write New Style" and name it something like "Print Pocket"
   
   
4. In the body of the new style enter (you can copy-paste the code below):

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("getpocket.com") and media print {
  .reader_content
  {
    min-width: 100% !important;
  }
}

5. Click Save and reload the Pocket page/article:
   
   

Now when you print articles out of Pocket web, they will be much more readable, and the best part is - your Pocket reading experience remains completely unaffected:

In closing, since you've already installed Stylish in your browser, try to play around more with the custom styles for other websites. It's great for removing oversized headers, making background and text colors more readable and just generally making the web look the way you want it to look.