After I put together the first version of the Fabric extension (my previous post about the first version), it really helped me use those Fabric patterns on web pages. But there were some downsides: it couldn’t read PDFs on the web, nor did it work with YouTube video pages. This was a bit of a bummer because a lot of cool stuff like academic papers and reports are usually in PDF format. Plus, I wanted to use Fabric to pull out key info from YouTube podcasts and courses. The first version just couldn’t handle that.

Now, I’m happy to say I’ve updated the Fabric extension! This new version can read PDF content on the web and work with YouTube video pages too.

Let’s start with PDFs. You just open a web page with a PDF, like a paper on arxiv.org. Click the Fabric extension icon in your browser toolbar like usual. When it pops up, it’ll automatically detect the PDF content and show you an input box where you can choose which pages you want to process. This is super handy because sometimes we’ve got a hefty PDF but only want parts of it, like just the intro or the conclusion. So, you can specify individual page numbers or a range, or leave it blank to process the whole PDF. For our example, I’d just want it to handle the first three pages where the introduction is.

Now, when it comes to YouTube videos, there’s a bit more setup.

Let’s say you’re watching the NBC Nightly News and want a summary. After opening the video page, click the “…more” link below the video’s description.

In the full description, scroll to find the “Show Transcript” button and give it a click.

That opens up the video’s transcript panel on the right.

Activate the Fabric extension now, and it’ll grab the transcript from the page. Then you can pick the summary pattern (or whichever pattern you like) to process the transcript.

And that’s how the new Fabric extension features work. Hope you find it useful in your work or daily life!

If you’d like to check out the source code or installation instructions, head over its GitHub repo here: https://github.com/sluosapher/fabric-chrome-extension.