A Drop-In Web-to-Markdown Toggle

Web WidgetFor Site Owners

The Paperboy widget drops a small web/markdown toggle onto any site — a single script tag and the page can be read as clean markdown beside its ordinary HTML self. Documentation, blogs, content sites, and reference manuals gain an export button that hands readers structured text to take with them.

The whole thing runs in the browser. Your page is converted client-side via Mozilla’s Readability and Turndown — no servers, no round trips, no fees per request. The widget reads the DOM at the moment the user asks for it and returns markdown that copies straight to the clipboard.

One line in your HTML, and your readers can leave with the prose. The rendered demo below shows the toggle on the article it sits inside.

Live Demonstration

The widget’s toggle appears at the bottom-right corner of the demo article below. Switch to Markdown view and the entire article — image, headings, table, lists, highlighted text and all — converts in place.

The Morning Bulletin — a Sample Front Page

Rotary Press Strikes Its Hundred-Thousandth Edition Before Dawn

From Our Night DeskThe Morning Bulletin · Vol. XLIV

The composing room at midnight: the press in full motion, type-cases on the wall, pressmen reading proofs.
Fig. 1. The composing room at the height of the night shift, drawn from a sketch made on the floor in the small hours.

The night shift filed copy until the small hours. By two in the morning, the rotary press in the basement was running its eighth plate change, the pressmen shouting line counts over the roar of paper threading through the cylinders. Three editions went out to the streetcars before sunrise; a fourth went to the printers’ ink-stained wholesalers, who would carry the news as far as the river.

By the time the day reporters reached their desks, the paper was already on a hundred thousand kitchen tables— a circulation record for any single edition since the founding of this paper in eighteen sixty-one.

Closing Market Quotations

As wired from the Exchange at the close of trading, Tuesday afternoon.

IssueOpenCloseChange
Steel Common112 ¼114 ⅛+1 ⅞
Atchison Topeka88 ⅜87 ½− ⅞
Standard Oil (NJ)203 ¾206 ⅜+2 ⅝
Western Union Telegraph61 ⅛60 ½− ⅝

Top Stories on Today’s Wire

  1. City council postpones gas-lamp ordinance until the spring session.
  2. Trans-Atlantic steamer Britannia docks twelve hours ahead of schedule.
  3. Late-night fire at the Fourth Street warehouse contained without loss of life.
  4. Cable from London: opening odds on the championship prize-fight.

Weather Watch

  • Morning: clear and cold, light wind from the north-east.
  • Midday: scattered showers expected by the river.
  • Evening: heavy fog along the harbor by ten o’clock.
Editor’s Note

The widget you are using right now read this entire article — image, headings, table, ordered and unordered lists, and the highlighted phrases — and produced markdown with all of that structure intact. Copy it. Paste it where you will. The press has done its work.

Capabilities, Catalogued

  • One script tag
    Add a single <script> to your page. The widget mounts a toggle button and a markdown panel. No build step, no configuration required.
  • Targeted extraction
    Set data-selector to any CSS selector to scope what gets converted. Without it, the widget walks <main>,<article>, or the body in order.
  • One-click copy
    The markdown panel includes a copy button that places the output on the clipboard. Readers leave with the prose intact and the formatting honest.
  • Tiny payload
    ~27 KB minified. Loads once, runs entirely in-browser. Zero server infrastructure, zero usage cost.
  • No external requests
    Everything happens locally in the visitor’s browser. The widget does not phone home and does not transmit your content to any third party.
  • Theme-respecting
    Inherits font and colour from the host page so it sits inside your design rather than clashing with it.

Installation

Add the script (jsdelivr CDN)

<script
  src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@proticom/paperboy-widget@latest"
  data-selector="main"
></script>

Drop the script tag in and the widget is live. The jsDelivr CDN serves the latest published build; self-host the bundle from your own static assets if you prefer not to depend on a CDN. Place the tag near the end of <body>, after the content the widget should convert. Build from the GitHub repository if you need to fork or customize.

Self-hosted (no CDN)

<script
  src="/assets/paperboy-widget.min.js"
  data-selector="#article"
></script>

Download the bundle from GitHub Releases and serve it from your own static directory. No network calls at runtime.

The widget shares the converter engine with the desktop editor, the Chrome extension, and the command-line edition. One press, four mastheads.