gevhaz / boksynt

Download articles from internet and convert them to epub

boksynt

boksynt is a simple CLI tool for downloading and converting articles to the EPUB format so that they can be put on an e-book reader or just read without any clutter and offline in your favorite EPUB reading software.

Installation

To use the latest release:

1. Download the latest binary release from GitHub and run it directly with ./boksynt or put it in your PATH so you can run boksynt from anywhere.
2. To use the latest development version:
   1. Clone this repository.
   2. You can immediately use it with go run main.go.

Requirements

You need to have Pandoc installed for boksynt to work. Other dependencies are specified in go.mod and should be handled automatically if you're running boksynt from the cloned repository.

Usage

The following flags are available:

Usage of Boksynt:
  -f, --file string
                Path to file with URLs to articles to be fetched and converted
  -o, --output-dir string
                Directory where the final epub files should be placed
  -t, --tag string
                Comma separated list of tags that should be added to articles

The flow is:

1. Create a file with URLs that you want downloaded and converted.
2. Run the app and provide the path to your file to the --file flag.

Running the following:

boksynt --file urls --output-dir articles --tag "Newspaper articles"

You should get output that looks somewhat like this:

If the file urls has the following content:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/06/young-ukrainians-ukraine-russia-war/661213/
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/06/irma-vep-tv-series-review/661230/
https://theintercept.com/2022/06/09/ice-lexisnexis-mass-surveillances/
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jun/09/65000-year-old-swiss-army-knife-proves-ancient-humans-shared-knowledge-research-says

Development status

This is a work in progress, but the basic functionality is there. Third-party software Go-Readability which is a Go port of Mozilla Readability handles the actual parsing of websites, so that part should be pretty mature.

boksynt's Issues

Slash in title breaks title image download

Solve by replacing slashes with something else.

Don't crash when an article can't be downloaded

If there is trouble downloading an article, skip it and proceed to the next instead of crashing the whole app.