isalin / url_to_pdf

A simple python script that downloads a page as pdf.

This script will download the given urls as pdf files, using Microsoft Playwright (Chromium).

Installation

The script has a dependency on Playwright and BeautifulSoup4, which can be installed using pip:

pip install playwright
playwright install
pip install beautifulsoup4

Usage

NOTE: You might have to add https:// to the start of the urls!

To download pages directly, run the script with urls as the arguments:

python url_to_pdf.py <url> <url> <url>...

Downloading from urls in a file

To download pages from a file, run the script with the file as the argument:

python url_to_pdf.py -f <file>

The file should contain one url per line.

Downloading multiple files using numeric names

Maybe you want to download a bunch of pages as pdfs, and then combine them into a single large pdf file (see tips for suggestions on how to combine them), so you can read a bunch of articles while you're stuck on a plane without internet.

You can use the -n flag to specify that the script should save the urls using sequential numbers as the names. Ex. 0001.pdf, 0002.pdf, 0003.pdf etc.

python url_to_pdf.py -n <url> <url> <url>...

Or

python url_to_pdf.py -n -f <file>

Known issues

There's a bug where Playwright will get stuck on browser.new_page() if you have DISPLAY environment variable set with no X Server running. Clear the DISPLAY environment variable to fix this.

Tips

If you download multiple PDF-files, and want to combine them into one, you can use the poppler-utils package, which contains the pdfunite tool:

pdfunite *.pdf output.pdf

Or if you're on macOS, you can use the built-in sips tool. Though my understanding is that sips is not specifically designed for combining PDFs, so there may be some limitations or issues with certain PDF files.

sips -s format pdf *.pdf --out combined.pdf