akweteco01: Change the appearance of Safari Reader in Safari 5.1

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Change the appearance of Safari Reader in Safari 5.1

Safari Reader is a useful feature for making many websites more readable, but Apple doesn't provide any preference settings for Reader. Fortunately, it is easy to customize by editing the file Reader.html.

In Safari 5.0 it was easy to edit a file in the Safari.app package to set the preferences. In Safari 5.1, the file was moved to a non-obvious place:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Safari.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Reader.html

You can simply edit the stylesheet in this file to change the appearance of Reader. Any changes will apply to tabs that Safari Reader has not yet been used in, just open a new tab to see the new style. As always, be careful when editing system files, and make a backup of Reader.html first. Be aware that some of the styles appear to be overwritten before you see them. For example, changing the size of the body font has no ef ...