3. Graphics Functionality

This section describes the two graphical tools I have developed: Section 3.1 matches a small subset of functionality that the Readability tool handles excellently; Section 3.2 is a PyQt4 GUI front-end to the Readability API.

3.1. GUI: Media Website Text Formatter

This GUI can read from the following media websites: Lightspeed Magazine, Medium, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Here is a screenshot!

Fig. 3.1 A screenshot of the GUI reader, converting the URL for the The New York Times into text. Note the separate icons above for the five media websites from which this GUI can read.

The screenshots of the save file dialog and the print preview dialog are shown below.

Fig. 3.2 The GUI screenshot of the save dialog.

Fig. 3.3 The GUI screenshot of the print preview dialog.

I do not support or maintain this tool after I found out about Readability.

Furthermore, Readability is long gone and its developers and maintainers have scattered to the four winds. None of its functionalities work anymore.

3.2. GUI2: Readability GUI Front-End

This is the PyQt4 GUI front-end to Readability.

Fig. 3.4 The list form of the article’s content, with working dialogs for Font and Print Preview. Coloration helps with readability.

Fig. 3.5 The text form of the article’s content, with working dialogs for Font and Print Preview. The behavior of the buttons are shown in the subsequent figures.

A screenshot of the font changing dialog, the Font button, and a screenshot of the print preview dialog, the Print button, are shown below.

Fig. 3.6 The Font button dialog. This lets the user select through the fonts that currently exist in the system.

Fig. 3.7 The print preview dialog launched by the Print button in the article text widget.

In the immediate future, I plan on at least implementing the following, all using the Readability API.

• EPUB button, to create the article in EPUB format.

• Adding and deleting articles through the article list widget.