Newbie Greasemonkey script writing (Shallow Thoughts)

Newbie Greasemonkey script writing

I was reading a terrific article on the New York Times about Watching Whales Watching Us. At least, I was trying to read it -- but the NYT website forces font faces and sizes that, on my system, end up giving me a tiny font that's too small to read. Of course I can increase font size with Ctrl-+ -- but it gets old having to do that every time I load a NYT page.

The first step was to get Greasemonkey working on Firefox 3.5. "Update scripts" doesn't find a new script, and if you go to Greasemonkey's home page, the last entry is from many months ago and announces Firefox 3.1 support. But curiously, if you go to the Greasemonkey page on the regular Mozilla add-ons site, it does support 3.5.

I've had Greasemonkey for quite some time, but every time I try to get started writing a script I have trouble getting started. There are dozens of Greasemonkey tutorials on the web, but most of them are oriented toward installing scripts and don't address "What do you type into the fields of the Greasemonkey New User Script dialog?"

Fortunately, I did find one that explained it: The beginner's guide to Greasemonkey scripting. I gave my script a name (NYT font) and a namespace (my own domain), added http://*nytimes.com/* for Includes, and nothing for Excludes.

Click OK, and Greasemonkey offers a "choose editor" dialog. I chose emacs, which mostly worked though the emacs window unaccountably came up with a split window that I had to dismiss with C-x 1.

Now what to type in the editor? Firebug came to the rescue here.

I went back to the NYT page with the too-small fonts and clicked on Firebug. The body style showed that they're setting

font-family: Georgia, serif
font-size: 84.5%

84.5%? Where does that come from? What happens if I change that to 100%? Fortunately, I can test that right there in the Firebug window. 100% made the fonts fairly huge, but 90% was about right.

I went back to greasemonkey's editor window and added:

document.body.style.fontSize = "90%";

Saved the file, and that was all I needed! Once I hit Reload on the NYT page I got a much more readable font size.

Tags: web, browsers, firefox, greasemonkey, programming
[ 12:30 Jul 12, 2009    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]