Installation

The easiest way to install polyglot is to use pip:

pip install polyglot

Or you can clone the github repo and install from a local version of the code:

git clone git@github.com:thespacedoctor/polyglot.git
cd polyglot
python setup.py install

To upgrade to the latest version of polyglot use the command:

pip install polyglot --upgrade

Development

If you want to tinker with the code, then install in development mode. This means you can modify the code from your cloned repo:

git clone git@github.com:thespacedoctor/polyglot.git
cd polyglot
python setup.py develop

Pull requests are welcomed!

Sublime Snippets

If you use Sublime Text as your code editor, and you’re planning to develop your own python code with polyglot, you might find my Sublime Snippets useful.

Issues

Please report any issues here.

Command-Line Usage

Documentation for polyglot can be found here: http://pypolyglot.readthedocs.org/en/stable

Translate documents and webpages to various markup languages and document formats (html, epub, mobi ..)

Usage:
    polyglot init
    polyglot [-oc] (pdf|html|epub|mobi) <url> [<destinationFolder> -f <filename> -s <pathToSettingsFile>]
    polyglot kindle <url> [-f <filename> -s <pathToSettingsFile>]
    polyglot [-o] (epub|mobi) <docx> [<destinationFolder> -f <filename> -s <pathToSettingsFile>]
    polyglot kindle <docx> [-f <filename> -s <pathToSettingsFile>]
    polyglot [-o] kindleNB2MD <notebook> [<destinationFolder> -s <pathToSettingsFile>]

Options:
    init                                                            setup the polyglot settings file for the first time
    pdf                                                             print webpage to pdf
    html                                                            parse and download webpage to a local HTML document
    epub                                                            generate an epub format book from a webpage URL
    kindle                                                          send webpage article straight to kindle

    -h, --help                                                      show this help message
    -v, --version                                                   show version
    -o, --open                                                      open the document after creation
    -c, --clean                                                     add polyglot's clean styling to the output document
    <url>                                                           the url of the article's webpage
    <docx>                                                          path to a DOCX file
    -s <pathToSettingsFile>, --settings <pathToSettingsFile>        path to alternative settings file (optional)
    <destinationFolder>                                             the folder to save the parsed PDF or HTML document to (optional)
    -f <filename>, --filename <filename>                            the name of the file to save, otherwise use webpage title as filename (optional)

Documentation

Documentation for polyglot is hosted by Read the Docs (last stable version and latest version).

Command-Line Tutorial

Before you begin using polyglot you will need to populate some custom settings within the polyglot settings file.

To setup the default settings file at ~/.config/polyglot/polyglot.yaml run the command:

polyglot init

This should create and open the settings file; follow the instructions in the file to populate the missing settings values (usually given an XXX placeholder).

polyglot often relies on a bunch on other excellent tools to get it’s results like electron-pdf, pandoc and kidlegen. Depending on how you use polyglot, these tools may need to be install on your system.

To read the basic usage intructions just run polyglot -h.

Webpage Article to HTML document

To generate a parsed, cleaned local HTML document from a webpage at a given URL use polyglot’s html command:

polyglot html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

The filename for the output file is take from the webpage’s title and output in the current directory. Here’s the result.

To instead give both a destination output and a specified filename for the resulting document:

polyglot html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen ~/Desktop -f cars_and_stuff

To style the result with polyglots simple styling and easy to read fonts, use the -c flag:

polyglot -c html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen -f Volkswagen_Styled

See the result here.

Webpage Article to PDF

To instead print the webpage to PDF, you can either just print the original webpage:

polyglot pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen

with this result, or you can choose again to use polyglot’s styling:

polyglot -c pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen -f Volkswagen_Styled

resulting in this PDF.

Note if you are going to be running polyglot in a windowless environment, to generate the PDFs with electron-pdf <`https://github.com/fraserxu/electron-pdf>`_ you will need to install xvfb. To install and setup do something similar to the following (depending on your flavour of OS):

sudo apt-get install xvfb

then in whatever bash scripts you write add this before any polyglot commands:

export DISPLAY=':99.0'
Xvfb :99 -screen 0 1024x768x24 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Webpage Article to eBook

To generate an epub book from a webpage article run the command:

polyglot epub http://www.thespacedoctor.co.uk/blog/2016/09/26/mysqlSucker-index.html

Here is the output of this command.

If you prefer a mobi output, use the command:

polyglot mobi http://www.thespacedoctor.co.uk/blog/2016/09/26/mysqlSucker-index.html

To get this mobi book.

Send a Webpage Article Straight to Your Kindle

Polyglot can go even further than creating a mobi ebook from the web-article; it can also send the ebook straight to your kindle device or smart phone app (or both at the same time) as long as you have the email settings populated in the polyglot settings file.

polyglot kindle http://www.thespacedoctor.co.uk/blog/2016/09/26/mysqlSucker-index.html

And here’s the book appearing on a smart phone kindle app:

https://i.imgur.com/RQpvBZu.png

Converting Kindle Notebook HTML Exports to Markdown

On the Kindle app for iOS you can export an HTML document of your notes and annotations via email.

The colors of the annotation convert to markdown with the following color-key:

“blue”: “code”, “yellow”: “text”, “orange”: “quote”, “pink”: “header”

Todo

  • add a tutorial to convert kindle annotations