colusa

Render website to ebook to make it easier to read on devices.

Installation

python3 setup.py install

Usage

Start from scratch

First of all, we need to generate a configuration file for colusa to work on. colusa has builtin command to generate a template configuration as starter. Run following command to generate configuration file:

$ colusa init new_ebook.json

colusa will generate a configuration file as below:

{
    "title": "__fill the title__",
    "author": "__fill the author__",
    "version": "v1.0",
    "homepage": "__fill url to home page__",
    "output_dir": "__fill output dir__",
    "urls": []
}

We have to modify the configuration file to fill up valid information.

Add content to ebook

After generating the configuration file, all we need to do is adding (blog posts, articles, webs)' urls to urls field in the configuration file.

Example for final configuration:

{
    "title": "The Great Mental Models",
    "author": "Farnam Street Media Inc",
    "version": "v1.0",
    "homepage": "https://fs.blog",
    "output_dir": "fsblog",
    "urls": [
        "https://fs.blog/2018/04/first-principles/",
        "https://fs.blog/2016/04/second-order-thinking/",
        "https://fs.blog/2017/06/thought-experiment/",
        "https://fs.blog/2018/05/probabilistic-thinking/",
        "https://fs.blog/2019/12/survivorship-bias/"
    ]
}

Update ebook content

We can update ebook content by modifying the urls, by adding or removing url in the urls, the result ebook will be changed.

Generate ebook content

After adding or removing url in urls, we need to invoke colusa to have it regenerate ebook content. Run following command at terminal:

$ colusa generate new_ebook.json

By invoking above command, colusa will download webpages (specified in urls), parse, transform them to asciidoc format, and save them to output_dir. colusa also create a neccessary information for ebook compilating at later steps.

Compile ebook for consuming purpose

Prerequisites

Before generating ebook, we need to install asciidoctor tools. Follow install guideline on following websites:

• for generating html: https://asciidoctor.org
• for generating epub: https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-epub3/
• for generating pdf: https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-pdf/

Generating ebooks

To help with generating ebook, colusa also create a Makefile in the root folder of the ebook. In the Makefile, there are three common targets that we can use to generate ebook in html, epub, pdf formats.

# to generate html
$ make html

# to generate epub
$ make epub

# to generate pdf
$ make pdf

Generated ebooks will be saved to ./output folder.

user:output/ $ ls                                                            [10:55:55]
total 3056
drwxr-xr-x  10 320B images
-rw-r--r--   1 699K index.epub
-rw-r--r--   1 131K index.html
-rw-r--r--@  1 694K index.pdf

List of Supported Website

Currently colusa supports only limited number of websites. The following list all support websites:

• https://untools.co
• https://unintendedconsequenc.es
• https://blog.acolyer.org
• https://fs.blog
• https://increment.com
• https://slack.engineering
• https://medium.com
• https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/
• https://www.preethikasireddy.com
• https://engineering.atspotify.com
• https://truyenfull.vn
• https://avikdas.com
• https://www.infoq.com

Contribution

Contribution is welcome. You can open issues to request for supporting more websites, open PR to help with those issues, or anything else like documentation, code contribution.