url2epub VS readability

Somewhat similarly, I wrote a web app to generate epub (instead of pdf) out of urls and send to eink reader(s) directly (via a telegram bot) so I can read them. Currently it supports sending epub by email (for kindle) or uploading epub to dropbox (for kobo, etc.). It originally also supports reMarkable cloud but we can no longer make reMarkable cloud actually work. There's also a REST api to generate epub to be downloaded directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

For e-ink readers epubs are generally better than PDFs for urls anyways, as epubs are basically packed htmls, and also the flow text works better on smaller screens.

I wrote a service (Google Cloud Run as the backend, with Telegram bot as the frontend) to generate readable ePub from URLs and send directly to e-ink readers. It was originally wrote for reMarkable 2 (using reMarkable cloud), I recently added support for Kindle (by using the send-to-kindle emails). The code is at https://github.com/fishy/url2epub and I blogged about the recently added kindle support at https://b.yuxuan.org/url2epub-kindle.

I'm open to suggestions on what other e-ink platforms to add, as long as they have a reasonable cloud API. I'm also looking for a good e-ink platform to move to personally, as it becomes apparent that reMarkable really doesn't want third parties to use their proprietary cloud "API".

2. It's a relatively open system (compared to other e-ink readers), so it's pretty fun in terms of hackability.

I did get the forever free subscription which helps, but I also totally understand why they would want to charge for that, and I think the new $3/month is a pretty reasonable price for it.

Regarding instapaper use case and also hackability, shameless plug: I wrote https://github.com/fishy/url2epub for my own use case, so instead of relying on a third party service and manually sync stuff to reMarkable 2, I just send the link to the telegram bot (I picked telegram bot so that I can easily send links from my phone, not only desktops), and the epub will be auto synced to my reMarkable cloud account (they did made some changes to the cloud api causing I have to manually open their official mobile or desktop app to sync once before the reMarkable 2 itself would accept the new epub I uploaded through url2epub, haven't figured out how to avoid that yet, but it's still mostly automated).

For reMarkable, I also wrote a Telegram bot to convert http url into ePub and send to reMarkable directly: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub

(if you don't like telegram or don't use reMarkable, it also comes with a public rest API to generate epub out of urls)

Shameless plug and this is only loosely related: Over the last holiday season I wrote a backend (written in Go and running on App Engine) to convert http url into epub. The frontend is a telegram bot that sends the epub to your reMarkable account directly, but it also has rest api to download the epub file: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/blob/main/REST.md

With the purchase of reMarkable 2, I have this need to easily send web articles to my reMarkable 2 from my phone, while officially they only provided a Chrome extension, which can only be used on desktops.

As a result I wrote some go code (https://github.com/fishy/url2epub) for the past 2 days, to generate ePub from URL. I also implemented reMarkable API to send them to reMarkable tablets directly.

The current UI for it is implemented as a Telegram bot (https://t.me/url2rM_bot?start=1), running on AppEngine (code: https://github.com/fishy/url2epub/tree/main/appengine). I initially considered making an Android app for the UI, but decided that Telegram bot is less work for me, and works good enough for this use case (sorry for people who don't use Telegram, but this also means that people on iOS, desktop, etc. will be able to use it).

For the future, I might do:

- Expand the URLs supported (currently it only supports URLs with an AMP version provided, and the AMP version does have article tag inside)

Why not just use something like https://github.com/mozilla/readability

And not pay $0.01 per request?

There’s a node version too https://www.npmjs.com/package/@mozilla/readability

I'm working with the Mozilla's readability library https://github.com/mozilla/readability to get the "readable" text from articles and now I want to style the extracted text in a readable way.

Do you remember the Firefox Reader View? It's a feature that removes all unnecessary components like buttons, menus, images, and so on, from a website, focusing on the readable content of the page. The library powering this feature is called Readability.js, which is open source.

I wonder if Firefox "reader mode as a utility" might be a viable alternative for Pinboard like "content oriented" archiving?

https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Depending upon the type of content, one might want to look into using the Readability (Browder's reader view) to parse the webpage. It will give you all the useful info without the junk. Then you can put it in the DB as needed.

https://github.com/mozilla/readability

Btw, readability, is also available in few other languages like Kotlin:

https://github.com/dankito/Readability4J

Use Mozilla's Readability to extract that sweet, sweet text content from webpages.

Same as above but the ability to grab the entire article text (you can use the Readability library for that: https://github.com/mozilla/readability)

// Original script // https://gist.github.com/kepano/90c05f162c37cf730abb8ff027987ca3 // Bookmarklet Converter // https://caiorss.github.io/bookmarklet-maker/ // Libraries // https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown // https://github.com/mozilla/readability javascript: Promise.all([import('https://unpkg.com/[email protected]?module'), import('https://unpkg.com/@tehshrike/[email protected]'), ]).then(async ([{ default: Turndown }, { default: Readability }]) => { /* Optional vault name */ const vault = ""; /* Optional folder name such as "Clippings/" */ const folder = "Clippings/"; /* Optional tags */ const tags = ""; function getSelectionHtml() { var html = ""; if (typeof window.getSelection != "undefined") { var sel = window.getSelection(); if (sel.rangeCount) { var container = document.createElement("div"); for (var i = 0, len = sel.rangeCount; i < len; ++i) { container.appendChild(sel.getRangeAt(i).cloneContents()); } html = container.innerHTML; } } else if (typeof document.selection != "undefined") { if (document.selection.type == "Text") { html = document.selection.createRange().htmlText; } } return html; } const selection = getSelectionHtml(); const { title, byline, content } = new Readability(document.cloneNode(true)).parse(); function getFileName(fileName) { var userAgent = window.navigator.userAgent, platform = window.navigator.platform, windowsPlatforms = ['Win32', 'Win64', 'Windows', 'WinCE']; if (windowsPlatforms.indexOf(platform) !== -1) { fileName = fileName.replace(':', '').replace(/[/\\?%*|"<>]/g, '-'); } else { fileName = fileName.replace(':', '').replace(/\//g, '-').replace(/\\/g, '-'); } return fileName; } const fileName = getFileName(title); if (selection) { var markdownify = selection; } else { var markdownify = content; } if (vault) { var vaultName = '&vault=' + encodeURIComponent(`${vault}`); } else { var vaultName = ''; } const markdownBody = new Turndown({ headingStyle: 'atx', hr: '---', bulletListMarker: '-', codeBlockStyle: 'fenced', emDelimiter: '*', }).turndown(markdownify); var date = new Date(); function convertDate(date) { var yyyy = date.getFullYear().toString(); var mm = (date.getMonth()+1).toString(); var dd = date.getDate().toString(); var mmChars = mm.split(''); var ddChars = dd.split(''); return yyyy + '-' + (mmChars[1]?mm:"0"+mmChars[0]) + '-' + (ddChars[1]?dd:"0"+ddChars[0]); } const today = convertDate(date); // This is the output template // It is similar to an Obsidian core template // except to insert a value we use: ${value} instead of {{value}} const fileContent =`--- type: clipping date_added: ${today} aliases: [] tags: [${tags}] --- author:: ${byline.toString().split('\n')[0].trim()} source:: [${title}](${document.URL}) ${markdownBody} `; // This copies your text to the clipboard navigator.clipboard.writeText(fileContent); // This creates a new document in Obsidian containing your clipping // I commented it out as this isn't what you asked for /* document.location.href = "obsidian://new?" + "file=" + encodeURIComponent(folder + fileName) + "&content=" + encodeURIComponent(fileContent) + vaultName; */ })