PDF Newspaper 2.4

General options
Premium options (24 €/year, more information)
Bookmarklet (more information)

Test the output with one of these feeds...

Medialens SchNEWS New Left Project UK Indymedia Mark Curtis

PDF Newspaper 2.4 is now available for purchase!
See screenshots

About

This is a free software project to help people create printable PDFs from content found on the web. It is being developed as part of the Five Filters project to promote alternative, non-corporate media.

Bookmarklet

To easily convert web pages and feeds into PDF, we provide a bookmarklet which can be added to your browser's bookmarks toolbar. Once added, you can get a PDF version of any web page or feed you're viewing by clicking the bookmarklet - no need to visit this website.

The bookmarklet is available in the options panel (click 'show options...' on the form above). Before dragging it up to your bookmarks toolbar, configure it by setting the title, story order, image, full-text and other options. Then drag up. If you've never used a bookmarklet before, read more.

WordPress Plugin

WordPress logo

Make PDF Newspaper is a new WordPress plugin which integrates the FiveFilters.org code and allows users to offer their content in PDF form. Many thanks to Martin Hawksey for developing the plugin.

API

To create a PDF from a web page or a feed, pass the URL (encoded) in the querystring to the following URL:

To customise the output, the following options can be appended to the querystring above (again, make sure to URL encode the values):

If you have an API key, add that to the querystring:

Note: When a valid API key is supplied, the service redirects to another URL to hide the API key - a key ID and unique hash replace the API key in the querystring. The API key should not be shared, so if you'd like to link to a PDF publically while protecting your API key, make sure you copy and paste the URL that results after the redirect.

Web Service Limits: Free and Paid Access

We have imposed limits to keep the service running smoothly and to avoid abuse. Certain features have also been reserved for paying users:

Free24 €/year
PDF pages produced per feed (A4) ~10 ~20
Full-text fetches per feed 4 10
Customisable subheading No Yes
Custom title image No Yes (should be emailed to us)
Custom fonts No Yes (should be emailed to us)

If you don't like the limits associated with the free service, you can either download the source code and host it yourself (see below) or or get premium access for 24 € a year and continue to use the hosted solution here on fivefilters.org. (Note: premium access can take a few hours to be activated.)

Hosted or Self-hosted?

We want our users to be free to examine and run the code behind FiveFilters.org however they like. As such, in addition to our hosted option, we also give you the option of self-hosting.

Using the hosted service is the easiest option as we manage everything. You do not have to worry about staying up to date because we maintain the code and any changes we make will automatically be made available to you.

If, however, you have your own hosting account or manage your own server, the self-hosted option gives you the freedom to run the code and manage everything yourself without relying on us. It also gives developers the opportunity to examine the code and make changes.

Premium Access
hosted service — 24 €/year

System Requirements

PHP 5.2 or above is required. The code has been tested on shared hosting and other environments. We recommend you download and run our simple compatibility test before purchasing. It's a single (zipped) PHP file you can upload to your server and access through your browser. It will tell you whether your server is capable of running PDF Newspaper.

PDF Newspaper has been tested on Windows and Linux using the Apache web server. If you're a Windows user, you can try it on your own machine using WampServer. We have also tested the code with paid hosting services NearlyFreeSpeech.NET and Dreamhost.

The application uses PHP, TCPDF, HTML Purifier, SimplePie, PHP Typography, OPML Parser, PHP Hooks and Full-Text RSS.

Download and Installation

Current version: 2.4 — 2011-11-19 — Changelog

PDF Newspaper 2.4 costs 20 € and includes:

PDF Newspaper 2.4
zip package — 20 €

After paying you will automatically receive an email with a download link to the zip package. The zip package contains a readme file with instructions for uploading the code to your web host via FTP.

Stay up to Date

If you'd like to receive email notification when we make changes to the PDF Newspaper service or new code releases, please sign up below.

Follow us on Twitter

Support

We encourage people to use our public forums for posting questions and reporting issues.

If you've purchased a copy and need support setting it up, you can also email us: help@fivefilters.org

License

AGPL logo
This web application is licensed under the AGPL version 3 — which basically means if you use the code to offer the same or similar service for your users, you are also required to share the code with your users so they can run it for themselves. (More on why this is important.)

The software components used by the application are licensed as follows...

Author

Created by Keyvan Minoukadeh for the Five Filters project.
Email: fivefilters (at) fivefilters.org