Is there a tool to turn a list of URLs into a newspaper-looking thing

May 25, 2019 2:50 PM

I have a bunch of URLs. I'm looking for a tool that will take those as input and generate printable output (a PDF I guess?) where the pages are typeset for printing on a home printer and look like a newspaper or text-heavy magazine.

This imaginary tool needs to:

• strip out the web cruft (advertising, most if not all of the images, pull quotes, etc.) but retain the headings, byline, date, etc. just like Instapaper/Mercury
• it needs to do the typesetting with print layout in mind. In particular I'd like it to look less like a screen-friendly web page more like a newspaper or a New Yorker or an Economist (i.e. several columns on a page, not a ton of whitespace)
• ideally needs to turn several URLs into a single document (although I guess I can join the output if it doesn't do that)

This isn't a one off so I don't want to do it by hand. I want to do this once a week or so. I'll be printing a single copy of the document on a home printer. Does this already exist, or am I going to have to write some code like an animal?

posted by caek to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

You have almost exactly described a service I used years ago, called Instapaper. The website still exists but I have no login so I cannot tell you if it still the same (though I assume it is better than 5 years ago).


Edit: my goodness I just reread your first bullet point and you mentioned Instapaper by name. Now I'm confused about what you're looking for i.e. what is Instapaper lacking?

Another similar app, that I've never personally tried, is called Pocket.
posted by McNulty at 5:14 PM on May 25, 2019

Response by poster: Instapaper doesn’t do the second two bullets.
posted by caek at 5:36 PM on May 25, 2019

Reader view in Firefox is highly customizable, although it can't really do your last bullet without some scripting. You'd probably have to do a little CSS tweaking to get your columns, but it's pretty straightforward.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:18 PM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

If you do have to write some code like an animal, newspaper for python might be a decent starting point.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:41 PM on May 25, 2019 [1 favorite]

This probably isn’t directly helpful, but in terms of prior art... Newspaper Club (a print-your-own-newspaper service some friends started years ago, still going) had a service called Paper Later (on archive.org), which you’d add URLs to and, when you had enough, it would grab the contents and lay them out into a newspaper, with columns and pictures, and post you the paper. Making everything fit nicely into columns and (multiples of 4) pages was pretty tricky. Sadly they closed the service after six months.
posted by fabius at 9:13 AM on May 26, 2019

Another similar app, that I've never personally tried, is called Pocket.

Pocket is great and can ingest a wide variety of news media, but - as with all services in this category--the parser sometimes has issues that can be hard to locate. (in the worst case you will sometimes lose a graf, or see authorship misattributed.)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:46 AM on May 26, 2019

(pocket will also not do the second or third bullets)
posted by Going To Maine at 10:50 AM on May 26, 2019

Response by poster: FiveFilters is it. Thanks! It doesn't look exactly like I want (two columns, ragged right, etc.), but it's close enough.

I did play with aspersioncast's suggestion to apply custom CSS to Firefox's Reader view and came up with the below, which I'm posting here for posterity. This is more what I want cosmetically (as close as possible to the NYRB), but it doesn't do my third bullet and involves more clicks to get everything printed.

@media print {
    @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
        body, p, div {
            font-family: 'Times New Roman' !important;
            font-size: 10pt !important;
            line-height: 11pt !important;
        }
        h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
            line-height: 100%;
        }
        body {
            columns: 3 !important; /* 2 may look better on A4 */
            color: black !important;
            margin: 0 !important;
            padding: 0 !important;
        }
        p {
            margin: 0 !important;
            padding: 0 !important;
            text-indent: 1em !important;
            text-align: justify !important;
        }
        p:first-of-type, h2+p {
            text-indent: 0 !important;
        }
        article {
            font-size: 10pt !important;
            line-height: 10pt !important;
        }
        figure, img {
            display: none !important;
        }
        sup {
            vertical-align: super !important;
            line-height: 0.5em !important;
        }
        h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
            margin: 0 !important;
            padding: 0 !important;
        }
        blockquote {
            margin: 1em 0 1em 0 !important;
            padding: 0 0 0 0.5em !important;
            font-size: 9pt !important;
            border: none !important;
        }
        header {
            font-style: italic !important;
            margin: 0 0 1em 0 !important;
            padding: 0 !important;
        }
        hr:first-of-type {
            display: none !important;
        }
        a:link, a:visited {
            color: inherit !important;
            border: none !important;
            text-decoration: underline !important;
            text-decoration-color: #ccc !important;
        }
        .reader-estimated-time {
            display: none !important;
        }
    }
}

posted by caek at 8:34 PM on May 26, 2019