

PDFed Hacker News Daily - redpill27
http://pdfcrowd.com/hackernews/

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bjonathan
Very nice, you should use <http://viewtext.org/> API to clean the pages and
comments. The PDF will be easier to read and with less pages :)

I love the idea!

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pdx
I want to implement something like viewtext.org on my own server (not using an
API). I recall somebody mentioning a package that did a pretty good job of
cleaning up a web page but can't find it. Can anybody recommend anything?

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gurraman
You might want to have a look at the source of readability:

[http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-
readability/source/browse...](http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-
readability/source/browse/trunk/)

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duck
I wonder about the copyright issue with this? It is basically packaging
someone else's work and producing it in another format. I thought that is why
Hacker Monthly had to contact each individual author to get permissions, or is
that just because he is selling it?

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pavs
HackerMonthly is repackaging several articles under a unified name. He is also
putting ads on the magazine and later selling them after the first couple of
issues. Not getting permission would have been both legally questionale and a
dick thing to do.

This "web-app" (if I may use the word), is a simple automated way of putting
multiple stories in to PDF format. You could do it yourself at home. There is
no ad, reformatting, or rebranding or selling involved.

This distinction seems very obvious to me.

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duck
Is the distinction obvious if I took your blog articles and packaged them in a
series of PDFs and published them on my site for download?

~~~
SimonPStevens
The distinction here is between the software and the distribution.

This is legal in the same way that software that rips MP3s from CDs is legal.

On the other hand, distributing the content isn't. So you can rip the content
and use it personally, but you can't distribute it without permission.

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pavs
Its a conversion tool, not a distribution tool.

~~~
SimonPStevens
That's my point. This web app is doing the content extraction and nothing
else. (I can see how perhaps I wasn't clear on that)

I'm saying that it would only be illegal if he attempted to distribute the
content too, which he doesn't.

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pavs
OK, I misread you.

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mike-cardwell
Nice. But limits you to the top 10. I regularly find stuff in the 10-20
positions that I want to read. Ideally you would be able to customise the
number of results and add filters to ignore articles with certain words in
their title.

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vic_nyc
Very good, for people on the go. If there was a way to also include the
HackerNews users' comments on it, it would be even better.

~~~
redpill27
There is an 'Include comments' checkbox which does exactly this.

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mirkules
I really like this! It will come in handy when I travel in a few days

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9ec4c12949a4f3
Honest criticism here with suggestion on how to please me.

I wasn't interested viewing a website I saw last week as a pdf. What I suggest
doing is checking out how arc90 made the readability bookmarklett, scoop
content that way so that it works on your pages with your own magazine-like
design that isn't boring. Include top comments, and create a section for
discussions (comments that get a lot of replies/nesting). I go far out of my
way to un-style every website to be nice and uniform without superfluous
content screaming at me from every direction (why did gopher:// have to
die?!).

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ajx
This is nice, but the API requires your app to communicate back to some
central web server in order to function...

