Reader mode

Reader mode shows an article as plain, comfortable reading: the text, its pictures and headings, without menus, ads, pop-ups or scripts. It also frees most of the page's memory.

Using it

When a page looks like an article, Aa appears in the toolbar.
Click Aa, press ⇧⌘R, or choose View → Reader Mode.
Press ⇧⌘R or click Aa again to return to the original page, where you left it.

The reader view shows the site, the title, the authors and an estimated reading time, then the article. It follows the system's light or dark appearance, and ⌘+ and ⌘− change the text size.

Following a link from the reader view opens that page normally in the same tab.

If Litr can't find an article on the page, it says "No article on this page".

Listen to an article

Press ⌥⌘L (View → Listen to Article) and Litr reads the article aloud in one of your Mac's own voices. On a page that isn't in reader mode yet, it switches to reader mode first. Nothing leaves your Mac.

It starts at the top, or, if you've scrolled down, at the first paragraph on screen.
The paragraph being read is shaded and the word being spoken is marked. The page scrolls along while you follow; scroll elsewhere and it leaves you be.
⌥⌘P pauses and goes on. ⌥⌘L again stops.
Switch to another tab and it keeps reading. The Now Playing strip in the sidebar shows the article, with ‹‹ and ›› to go back or on a paragraph, pause, and about how long is left. See Media.
The voice is chosen by the article's language, which Litr hears from the text itself (pages often say the wrong one). It's the voice you picked for that language in System Settings → Accessibility → Spoken Content, or a better one of the same language if you've downloaded one (Enhanced or Premium voices).
Going to another page, leaving reader mode or closing the tab stops it.

Saved copies

When you bookmark an article (⌘D) or highlight something in it (⇧⌘E), Litr keeps a reader copy of it on your Mac. When the page can't be opened later (you're offline, the site is down, the article is gone), the error page has Read Saved Copy, which shows the copy in reader mode, marked Saved copy from and the date. You can also choose View → Read Saved Copy, or find it in the command palette when the page has a copy, for instance to see the article as it was before it was changed.

Bookmarking saves a new copy each time; highlighting saves one only if the page has none yet.
When the article has changed since its copy was saved, the reader view says Changed since your saved copy of and the date, under the title. Show Changes marks what's new in green, puts back what was taken out, struck through, and shows in an edited paragraph which words went and which came. Hide Changes puts it back as it is now. Small changes alone, like an "Updated 10:32" line, aren't worth telling you about.
Pictures aren't saved; they show only with the network.
The copy is deleted when nothing keeps it any more: no bookmark and no highlight on the page.
Forget tabs never save copies.
Copies are compressed, so even a long article takes little room. Settings shows how many there are and how much they take.

Turn it off, or delete all copies, in Settings under Save copies of articles.

Memory

Entering reader mode throws the original page away, along with its scripts, ads and trackers. The article is shown as a static page, which typically needs a fraction of the memory. An NRK article went from 131 MB to 61 MB. Leaving reader mode loads the original page again, with its back and forward history and scroll position.

A tab that is unloaded while in reader mode comes back as the original page.

How it works

Litr uses Mozilla's Readability, the engine behind Firefox's Reader View, to find the article. It runs in WebKit's isolated script world, so the page's own scripts can't see or interfere with it. Readability is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.