newser VS rss2kindle

https://github.com/lnenad/newser is an open source project made specifically for this use case by an A5X user.

I've gotten myself a Supernote A5X (awesome device btw) and since it doesn't have a web browser or anything I've wanted to have a way to read news on it. I've hacked together this utility in a couple of days and it works wonders for me personally so I thought it might be interesting to others. It can also be used as a noise free newspaper generator as it removes images/ads/links and other noisy stuff.

https://github.com/lnenad/newser

(there is a screenshot of the first page of the generated pdf)

It scrapes (news) websites for content and puts it into a pdf. For me the pdf location is my dropbox supernote directory so my setup is to run this thing daily and have a fresh pdf with news whenever I want it.

It's rough around the edges probably (currently added crawl support for verge, ars, engadget) but I think it's a good base so if anyone wants to contribute feel free. Some of the stuff I want to add is pictures (maybe), maybe parse the text html to include font styling and other stuff.

I've tried to generalize it as much as possible so the crawling is pretty much automatic and is controlled by a config file where you define "rules" on how to parse the website.

I had a similar setup for creating PDF files from RSS feeds (https://github.com/adityam/rss2kindle). I was simply downloading the webpage, using pandoc to convert HTML to ConTeXt, and typesetting it via ConTeXt (this gave me a lot of control over the formatting and took care of including external images as well). I had a separate script which emailed the PDF to my kindle address.

The script worked reliably for multiple years until I stopped using the kindle. I now have a SuperNote A6X and both pandoc and context have improved significantly in the last decade, so I should give this another shot.