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When ReaderMD comes back empty

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You click the ReaderMD icon on a page full of text and the popover shows a few words, a navigation menu, or nothing. The page is right there. The extension did not see it.

There are three usual causes, and one of them has a fix you can apply in about five seconds.

The page was not finished when ReaderMD read it

Some sites, and a few big ones, ship an almost empty HTML document and then build the article with JavaScript after the page has loaded. MSN is the one we hear about most. If ReaderMD runs before that script has finished, it extracts the shell rather than the story, because the story is not on the page yet.

Wait for the page to settle, then try again. If the site keeps rebuilding itself, use the selection fallback below.

ReaderMD can only see what you can see

The extension reads the page inside your Safari tab. If an article is behind a paywall or a login, and you can see it, ReaderMD can extract it. If you cannot, neither can it. There is no server on the other end fetching a copy for you, which is also why nothing about your browsing leaves your device.

The layout defeats both engines

ReaderMD runs two extractors on every page, Defuddle and Mozilla Readability, scores both results, and keeps the better one. If both come back thin, it falls through semantic selectors and paragraph collection before giving up. Sites that are mostly video, image galleries, or unusual custom layouts can still leave every tier with too little to work with.

The fix: select the text first

  1. Select the article text with your cursor, the way you would to copy it.
  2. Click the ReaderMD toolbar icon.

Your selection is captured as formatted Markdown, with the same frontmatter and filename settings as an automatic clip. This works wherever you can select text, including the JavaScript-rendered sites above, and it is the right move whenever the automatic result looks wrong rather than empty.

If the icon is not there at all

Open Safari → Settings → Extensions and check that ReaderMD is enabled. A fresh install sometimes needs Safari restarted before the icon appears.