• Reported by Andreas

Last week, the Google Print bèta went live. Google Print is the interface to Google's massive Library Project, an impressive attempt to make offline material searchable online. However, the project is not without controversy: last week, some publishers disputed Google's claim of fair use and said the whole thing is a massive copyright infringement. The future will tell whether that statement is true or not.

In order to play it safe, Google decided to show it is really serious about author's rights: the Google Print bèta already has a number of copyright related limitations—you can only browse a few pages at a time, and of some pages, only the first couple of lines are readable.

However, the Google engineers also went so far as to break common browsing functionality: they disabled the context menu so as to prevent you from, you know, doing stuff copyright holders don't like. For Firefox users, there's a quick workaround for this one though: under Options / Web Features / (Enable JavaScript) Advanced, uncheck Disable or replace context menus and you're set. However, as they knew that that obstacle alone wouldn't be so hard to get around, they also added some extra annoyance: if you try to save the page scan, the only thing you get is a transparent placeholder, called cleardot.gif.

Let's have a closer look at a not-so-random Google Print result: in the source, we find this code snippet (breaks added):

<tr><td colspan=2><style type=text/css>.theimg { background-image:url("http://print.google.com/print?
id=RBtltKDulrcC&pg=99&img=1&q=w3mix&sig=VHc7xAQ46CpQwyz3tD6fi6dXIcQ");
background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center left;background-color:white; }</style><div class=browse><div class=theimg><img src=images/cleardot.gif width=575 height=751 class=border></div></div>

Yes, that's a style declaration inside the page body, applying a background image to the div with class theimg. A bit further, the background image is covered with the transparent cleardot.gif. Playing around a bit, I found out that hiding this transparent image brings back the context menu's lost functionality.

So, well, here's a Greasemonkey script (?) that does exactly that: install Google Print Enhance and you can use the context menu's View Background Image option again.

NB: as a side-effect, the script also eliminates those ugly black borders around each page scan.