D2L Tweaks

Adds a few Quality of Life tweaks to the online educational platform Brightspace Desire2Learn (D2L).

Currently implemented (only affects pages under the Content section):

• Makes the content view page longer to accomodate zoomed out pages/taller displays.
• Replaces custom PDF/MP4 media viewers with the web browser's native viewers.
• Uses native PDF viewer for PDF-rendered MS Word/Excel documents.
  • (Google Chrome) Uses an in-browser document editor, if installed.
• If possible, replaces the title bar dropdown with direct links/buttons.
• For external pages, renders the page inside D2L rather than simply providing a link.
• Provides a link to go to the direct Quiz page.

Planned:

• Enable hovering to show images, for the Table of Contents

Installing:

1. Install Tampermonkey (for Chrome or Firefox) or Greasemonkey (for Firefox)
   • Note that this script is not actively tested to work with Firefox/Greasemonkey, though it should be largely compatible. Bugs should be raised on Github as issues or pull-requests.
2. Open d2l-tweaks.user.js
3. Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey should prompt you to install the script.
   • If enabled, the script should occasionally auto-update if new versions are released.

Recommended Extensions

• HTML Video Keyboard Shortcuts (for Chrome) for shortcuts on embedded videos.
  • Notably, it adds '<' and '>' to adjust video playback speed.
• Office Editing for Docs, Sheets & Slides (for Chrome) to enable in-browser interactive office documents.
  • If you have the extension but don't want this script to use it, find this line in the source and change it to false.
    • OFFICE_DOCUMENTS_DIRECT_VIEW_USES_EXTENSION = true
• Markdown Here (for Chrome, Firefox) to enable authoring textboxes like Discussion board posts in markdown.

Developing

• Clone the repository
• Run npm install in the repo's directory
• Edit code, and run tsc to compile it. (tsc --watch for it to auto-compile on changes)
• For quick iteration, you may want to install a custom userscript that loads the project from disk. (Change the path after the @require)