Web pages, PDFs and feeds, fetched into one folder that any e-reader reads offline.
ink-drop is a set of small command-line stages. Each one does a single job and hands its result to the next through a plain folder, whose shape is the folder contract. The finished folder is the library: sync it to a Boox, a Kobo or any tablet with whatever already syncs there, Syncthing, WebDAV or a USB cable. Reading needs no network.
The French Wikipedia article on electronic paper, on the left as the web serves it and on the right as the EPUB the three stages made from it. Both are headless Chromium at 600×800, the EPUB page in greyscale with a serif stylesheet standing in for an e-ink reader's. Text CC BY-SA 4.0, photo in the public domain.
Each stage reads one line at a time on stdin, a URL for ink-fetch and
ink-feed and an item path for the others, and prints the paths it wrote.
-to sets the folder it writes to: ink-fetch, ink-feed and ink-readable
default to ink-drop/<stage> under the user cache folder, and ink-epub needs
it.
# 1. Build every stage
go build -o bin/ ./cmd/...
# 2. Turn one article into an EPUB in the library
echo https://example.org/post | bin/ink-fetch | bin/ink-readable | bin/ink-epub -to ~/Books
# 3. Turn the new posts of one site's feed into an EPUB digest
echo https://go.dev/blog/ | bin/ink-feed | bin/ink-epub -to ~/Booksink-feed takes a feed's address or a site's: given a page, it follows the
first feed the page names in a link tag. Nothing fetches feeds on its own:
docs/schedule.md sets up an hourly run that the user
enables.
| Stage | Job | State |
|---|---|---|
ink-fetch |
Downloads each URL into the work folder | Built |
ink-readable |
Strips each HTML item down to its article | Built |
ink-epub |
Packs each HTML item into an EPUB in the library | Built |
ink-feed |
Turns each RSS or Atom feed into one digest item | Built |
ink-mirror |
Crawls one site into a single HTML item | Not built |
A PDF needs no conversion: ink-readable passes it through and ink-epub
copies it into the library. ink-fetch inlines a page's images, so every
later stage runs offline.
ink-drop is a tool block under article VIII of the Offware constitution: it runs outside any app and feeds one through plain files. constitution.md checks it against every article.