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Saturday 13 October 2018

一个可以把网页抓取为pdf文件的命令行工具-percollate

A command-line tool to grab web pages as beautifully formatted PDFs.
Percollate is a command-line tool to turn web pages as beautifully formatted PDFs.

Table of Contents

Installation

💡 percollate needs Node.js version 8 or later, as it uses new(ish) JavaScript syntax.
You can install percollate globally:
# using npm
npm install -g percollate

# using yarn
yarn global add percollate
To keep the package up-to-date, you can run:
# using npm, upgrading is the same command as installing
npm install -g percollate

# yarn has a separate command
yarn global upgrade --latest percollate

Usage

💡 Run percollate --help for a list of available commands. For a particular command, percollate <command> --help lists all available options.

Available commands

CommandWhat it does
percollate pdfBundles one or more web pages into a PDF
percollate epubNot implemented yet
percollate htmlNot implemented yet

Available options

The pdfepub, and html commands have these options:
OptionWhat it does
-o, --output(Required) The path of the resulting bundle
--templatePath to a custom HTML template
--stylePath to a custom CSS
--cssAdditional CSS styles you can pass from the command-line to override the default/custom stylesheet styles

Examples

Basic PDF generation

To transform a single web page to PDF:
percollate pdf --output some.pdf https://example.com
To bundle several web pages into a single PDF, specify them as separate arguments to the command:
percollate pdf --output some.pdf https://example.com/page1 https://example.com/page2
You can use common Unix commands and keep the list of URLs in a newline-delimited text file:
cat urls.txt | xargs percollate pdf --output some.pdf

Custom page size / margins

The default page size is A5 (portrait). You can use the --css option to override it using any supported CSS size:
percollate pdf --output some.pdf --css "@page { size: A3 landscape }" http://example.com
Similarly, you can define:
  • custom margins: @page { margin: 0 }
  • the base font size: html { font-size: 10pt }
or, for that matter, any other style defined in the default / custom stylesheet.

Using a custom HTML template

⚠️ TODO add example here

Using a custom CSS stylesheet

⚠️ TODO add example here

Customizing the page header / footer

⚠️ TODO add example here

How it works

  1. Fetch the page(s) using got
  2. Enhance the DOM using jsdom
  3. Pass the DOM through mozilla/readability to strip unnecessary elements
  4. Apply the HTML template and the print stylesheet to the resulting HTML
  5. Use puppeteer to generate a PDF from the page

Troubleshooting

On some Linux machines you'll need to install a few more Chrome dependencies before percollate works correctly. (Thanks to @ptica for sorting it out)
The percollate pdf command supports the --no-sandbox Puppeteer flag, but make sure you're aware of the implications before disabling the sandbox.

See also

Here are some other projects to check out if you're interested in building books using the browser:

from https://github.com/danburzo/percollate

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