239 lines
9 KiB
Markdown
239 lines
9 KiB
Markdown
<p align="center"><img src="./paperoni-dark.png"></p>
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<p align="center"><i>Salami not included</i></p>
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<div align="center">
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<a href="https://crates.io/crates/paperoni">
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<img alt="crates.io version" src="https://img.shields.io/crates/v/paperoni.svg">
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</a>
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</div>
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Paperoni is a CLI tool made in Rust for downloading web articles as EPUB or HTML files. There is provisional<sup><a href="#pdf-exports">\*</a></sup> support for exporting to PDF as well.
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> This project is in an alpha release so it might crash when you use it. Please open an [issue on Github](https://github.com/hipstermojo/paperoni/issues/new) if it does crash.
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## Installation
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### Precompiled binaries
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Check the [releases](https://github.com/hipstermojo/paperoni/releases) page for precompiled binaries. Currently there are only builds for Debian and Arch.
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### Installing from crates.io
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Paperoni is published on [crates.io](https://crates.io). If you have [cargo](https://github.com/rust-lang/cargo) installed, then run:
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```sh
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cargo install paperoni --version 0.6.1-alpha1
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```
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_Paperoni is still in alpha so the `version` flag has to be passed._
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### Building from source
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This project uses `async/.await` so it should be compiled using a minimum Rust version of 1.33. Preferrably use the latest version of Rust.
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```sh
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git clone https://github.com/hipstermojo/paperoni.git
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cd paperoni
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## You can build and install paperoni locally
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cargo install --path .
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## or use it from within the project
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cargo run -- # pass your url here
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```
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## Usage
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```
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USAGE:
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paperoni [OPTIONS] [urls]...
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OPTIONS:
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--export <type>
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Specify the file type of the export. The type must be in lower case. [default: epub] [possible values:
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html, epub]
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-f, --file <file>
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Input file containing links
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-h, --help
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Prints help information
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--inline-images
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Inlines the article images when exporting to HTML using base64.
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This is used when you do not want a separate folder created for images during HTML export.
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NOTE: It uses base64 encoding on the images which results in larger HTML export sizes as each image
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increases in size by about 25%-33%.
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--inline-toc
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Add an inlined Table of Contents page at the start of the merged article. This does not affect the Table of Contents navigation
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--log-to-file
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Enables logging of events to a file located in .paperoni/logs with a default log level of debug. Use -v to
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specify the logging level
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--max-conn <max-conn>
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The maximum number of concurrent HTTP connections when downloading articles. Default is 8.
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NOTE: It is advised to use as few connections as needed i.e between 1 and 50. Using more connections can end
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up overloading your network card with too many concurrent requests.
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--no-css
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Removes the stylesheets used in the EPUB generation.
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The EPUB file will then be laid out based on your e-reader's default stylesheets.
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Images and code blocks may overflow when this flag is set and layout of generated
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PDFs will be affected. Use --no-header-css if you want to only disable the styling on headers.
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--no-header-css
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Removes the header CSS styling but preserves styling of images and codeblocks. To remove all the default
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CSS, use --no-css instead.
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--merge <output-name>
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Merge multiple articles into a single epub that will be given the name provided
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-o, --output-dir <output_directory>
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Directory to store output epub documents
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-V, --version
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Prints version information
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-v
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This takes upto 4 levels of verbosity in the following order.
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- Error (-v)
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- Warn (-vv)
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- Info (-vvv)
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- Debug (-vvvv)
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When this flag is passed, it disables the progress bars and logs to stderr.
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If you would like to send the logs to a file (and enable progress bars), pass the log-to-file flag.
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ARGS:
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<urls>...
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Urls of web articles
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```
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To download a single article pass in its URL
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```sh
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paperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni
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```
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Paperoni also supports passing multiple links as arguments.
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```sh
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paperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami
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```
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Alternatively, if you are on a Unix-like OS, you can simply do something like this:
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```sh
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cat links.txt | xargs paperoni
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```
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These can also be read from a file using the `-f/--file` flag.
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```sh
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paperoni -f links.txt
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```
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### Exporting articles
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By default, Paperoni exports to EPUB files but you can change to HTML by passing the `--export html` flag.
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```sh
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paperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni --export html
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```
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HTML exports allow you to read the articles as plain HTML documents on your browser but can also be used to convert to PDF as explained [here](#).
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When exporting to HTML, Paperoni will download the article's images to a folder named similar to the article. Therefore the folder structure would look like this for the command ran above:
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```
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.
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├── Pepperoni - Wikipedia
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│ ├── 1a9f886e9b58db72e0003a2cd52681d8.png
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│ ├── 216f8a4265a1ceb3f8cfba4c2f9057b1.jpeg
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│ ...
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└── Pepperoni - Wikipedia.html
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```
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If you would instead prefer to have the images inlined directly to the HTML export, pass the `inline-images` flag, i.e.:
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```sh
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paperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni --export html --inline-images
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```
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This is especially useful when exporting multiple links.
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**NOTE**: The inlining of images for HTML exports uses base64 encoding which is known to increase the overall size of images by about 25% to 33%.
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### Disabling CSS
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The `no-css` and `no-header-css` flags can be used to remove the default styling added by Paperoni. Refer to `--help` to see the usage of the flags.
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### Merging articles
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By default, Paperoni generates an epub file for each link. You can also merge multiple links
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into a single epub using the `merge` flag and specifying the output file.
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```sh
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paperoni -f links.txt --merge out.epub
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```
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### Logging events
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Logging is disabled by default. This can be activated by either using the `-v` flag or `--log-to-file` flag. If the `--log-to-file` flag is passed the logs are sent to a file in the default Paperoni directory `.paperoni/logs` which is on your home directory. The `-v` flag configures the verbosity levels such that:
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```
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-v Logs only the error level
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-vv Logs only the warn level
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-vvv Logs only the info level
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-vvvv Logs only the debug level
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```
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If only the `-v` flag is passed, the progress bars are disabled. If both `-v` and `--log-to-file` are passed then the progress bars will still be shown.
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## How it works
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The URL passed to Paperoni is fetched and the returned HTML response is passed to the extractor.
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This extractor retrieves a possible article using a [custom port](https://github.com/hipstermojo/paperoni/blob/master/src/moz_readability/mod.rs) of the [Mozilla Readability algorithm](https://github.com/mozilla/readability). This article is then saved in an EPUB.
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> The port of the algorithm is still unstable as well so it is not fully compatible with all the websites that can be extracted using Readability.
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## How it (currently) doesn't work
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This program is still in alpha so a number of things won't work:
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- Websites that only run with JavaScript cannot be extracted.
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- Website articles that cannot be extracted by Readability cannot be extracted by Paperoni either.
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- Code snippets on Medium articles that are lazy loaded will not appear in the EPUB.
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There are also web pages it won't work on in general such as Twitter and Reddit threads.
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## PDF exports
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PDF conversion can be done using a third party tool. There are 2 options to do so:
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### EPUB to PDF
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This requires that you install [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com/) which comes with a ebook conversion. You can convert the epub to a pdf through the terminal with `ebook-convert`:
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```sh
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# Assuming the downloaded epub was called foo.epub
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ebook-convert foo.epub foo.pdf
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```
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Alternatively, you can use the Calibre GUI to do the file conversion.
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### HTML to PDF
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The recommended approach is to use [Weasyprint](https://weasyprint.org/start/), a free and open-source tool that converts HTML documents to PDF. It is available on Linux, MacOS and Windows. Using the CLI, it can be done as follows:
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```sh
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paperoni https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepperoni --export html
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weasyprint "Pepperoni - Wikipedia.html" Pepperoni.pdf
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```
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Inlining images is not mandatory as Weasyprint will be able to find the files on its own.
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### Comparison of PDF conversion methods
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Either of the conversion methods is sufficient for most use cases. The main differences are listed below:
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| | EPUB to PDF | HTML to PDF |
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|----------------------|----------------------------|------------------|
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| Wrapping code blocks | Yes | No |
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| CSS customization | No | Yes |
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| Generated file size | Slightly larger | Slightly smaller |
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The difference in file size is due to the additional fonts added to the PDF file by `ebook-convert`.
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