Bookmobile

Simple command line script to download articles for offline viewing as markdown, simplified clean HTML and epub.

This is a fishscript (shell) gluing together pandoc and a Node.js package that implements the Firefox reader view. It uses a NPM package that uses Mozilla's own reability javascript. If that's not the right solution for you, jump down to the alternatives section at the end.

Dependencies

• fish
• Pandoc
• Node.js / NPM

Note: you must have the following sub-directories: originals/ reader/ epubs/ markdown/

Install

npm install readability-cli
git clone https://tildegit.org/exquisitecorp/bookmobile.git
cd bookmobile
chmod +x bookmobile.fish

Usage

./bookmobile.fish URL

Output:

A simplified HTML document will be saved to originals. A reader view with chosen (or default) theme will be saved to reader/. An epub in epubs/ and a markdown file to markdown sub-directory.

To change themes

The themes subdirectory contains several custom simple themes for rendering a nice reader view. You can edit these or add your own custom theme to this folder. Change the theme selection in line 3 of the bookmobile.fish file.

Alternatives

Currently there are a number of CLI programs that are ports of the Readability project. These may serve your needs better.

A partial listing can be found here