As most of you are probably aware, the News button on my iLiad is rather neglected. Currently there are no real services being offered. I'm wondering if anyone is aware of any software that would print multiple RSS feeds to PDF. At the moment I can't seem to find anything.

There are tons of free RSS feeds out there that could be used by the iLiad if such software existed. Currently, you can print feeds with Thunderbird, but its combersome because it asks you for a filename for each PDF you make.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea for anyone with some programming skills and some free time.

As most of you are probably aware, the News button on my iLiad is rather neglected. Currently there are no real services being offered. I'm wondering if anyone is aware of any software that would print multiple RSS feeds to PDF. At the moment I can't seem to find anything.

There are tons of free RSS feeds out there that could be used by the iLiad if such software existed. Currently, you can print feeds with Thunderbird, but its combersome because it asks you for a filename for each PDF you make.

Anyway, just throwing out an idea for anyone with some programming skills and some free time.

Since RSS is just data in an XML format, you could simply write a program to apply a style sheet to create HTML. The iLiad can read that directly. Or you could push the HTML through an HTML-to-PDF conversion to create a PDF.

There's already an online service that does exactly that: RSS 2 PDF (http://rss2pdf.com/)

Thank you for the help.

Unfortunately, RSS to PDF doesn't do exactly what I'm looking for.
See you get something like the attached file. Which is a list of links, which isn't particularly useful. What I would like to see is something that can take those links and then create pdfs from their contents. Much like what happens when you click on RSS feeds in Firefox or Thunderbird, the content comes up.

Unfortunately, RSS to PDF doesn't do exactly what I'm looking for.
See you get something like the attached file. Which is a list of links, which isn't particularly useful. What I would like to see is something that can take those links and then create pdfs from their contents. Much like what happens when you click on RSS feeds in Firefox or Thunderbird, the content comes up.

Keep in mind that Firefox and Thunderbird sometimes do alot of extra work for you.

I ran into this issue when playing wtih RSS feeds. Some of them were nothing more than a set of links. Thunderbird would go out and get each page as I read it.

Well what I think would be beneficial is a tool that would go out and get each page, except be able to do that in batch format. Take the entire feed, fetch each page, and PDF print it.

What would be even better, would be if you could get a tool to do that with syncronization, where you plug the device in and it automatically, deletes/uploads the feed. You'd get DRM free newspapers, and they wouldn't necessarily have to be conventional newspapers either. There are tons of RSS feeds with content that is better than your standard New York Times.

Moments like this kind of make me wish I had some programming skill. But, alas, I can simply throw out ideas for my betters to formulate.

Moments like this kind of make me wish I had some programming skill. But, alas, I can simply throw out ideas for my betters to formulate.

I too have sometimes lots of ideas, but no programming skills to back them up :(

The best thing out there that i know of is PDF-O-Matic (http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/pdf-o-matic.php)

i think it will be difficult to do, most sites have text either side of the main story and the text ends up too small to read.

i think i will give AutoIT and a XML-parser a try.
Maybe i get a more or less general RSS to HTML converter together. I'm thinking of getting article links from the RSS and RegExing them to print version links. Just have to figure out how to get rid of eventual ads and if I download images in the article or just try to throw them away.

think bbc news could be easy to do

main link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5394026.stm

printable version
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5394026.stm

fetch the xml and prepair an article list from xml and strip off the http:// bit from the main link and add http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/

might have a go later, i only know a small amount of tcl though.

Have a quick look at http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=39580#post39580 ... I was originally going to a pdf version, but I realised that doing it in HTML would give me free-scaling...!

AWESOME!

No, really, AWESOME!

Now if you could show us how you created this, maybe even whip out a front end to do it then you'd honestly have done more for the creation of content for the iLiad than iRex (which isn't hard at this point mind you)

i have test that the html2pdf cant support simple chinese and also big5 chinese.i hope that when it support the chinese. i am waiting for it .

AWESOME!

No, really, AWESOME!

Now if you could show us how you created this, maybe even whip out a front end to do it then you'd honestly have done more for the creation of content for the iLiad than iRex (which isn't hard at this point mind you)

:D Currently thinking how to do this... But you might see a rival iDS server. (Once I figure out the protocol they use)

Hi Guys,

Thanks for mentioning my webservice at http://rss2pdf.com

RSS 2 PDF offers a service called OPML 2 PDF where you can pass it the URL of an OPML list of newsfeeds.

RSS 2 PDF will then generate a PDF magazine or book from all the feeds listed in your OPML file (with a limit of 50 feeds).

Here's a sample PDF in this format:
http://rss2pdf.com/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fopml.rss2pdf.com%2Fwire d.opml&src=opml&title=Tom%27s+Picks+from+Wired+News

The above link appears truncated in this forum, so perhap it's best if you check out the sample on the RSS 2 PDF website (http://rss2pdf.com) .

If you want to create mobile-friendly PDF magazines of multiple feeds using my free OPML 2 PDF web service, you have to pass the following URL parameters to my web service using this format:

url = (the url-encoded link for your OPML file)
src = opml (tells my service to parse your url as an OPML file, and not as a single RSS or Atom feed - which is how RSS2PDF usually works)
title = (optional url-encoded title for your PDF Magazine)

Thanks a lot for mentioning RSS2PDF and you've got a cool forum here :happy2:

Tom Churm
Creator & Developer Guy
RSS2PDF
http://rss2pdf.com

@RSS2PDF

I tried clicking on the links in your PDF (from the link above) but I keep getting:

Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later.
Reference #11.42575d42.1160629606.40bc7f0

Also, your media size isn't iLiad friendly. Do you have the ability to set a custom media size and custom margins?

Can your service follow the link from the RSS and pull in the page it finds there, with pictures?

Hi Scotty,

My link works for me without any errors in a normal web browser on a PC.

I have no idea what kind of protocol your device uses to grab links...but I'm unfortunately unable to reproduce your error.

My service is primarily for PCs and mobile devices that have a mobile version of Acrobat Reader or a similar PDF reader installed...I'm sorry, but I'm totally unfamiliar with iLiad and am unwilling to alter my code just to make it compatible with your device.

Regarding:
>>Can your service follow the link from the RSS and pull in the page it finds there, with pictures?

No, my service doesn't 'follow the links' in the RSS. It simply converts the RSS or Atom feeds to PDFs. But it does have image support: just pass the following extra parameter to my webservice in the querystring:

img = 1

Sorry I can't be of more help to you.

BTW, I also have another mobile-friendly webservice here:
http://urlwash.com

URLwash transforms normal webpages into mobile-friendly ones, while filtering out images and scripts and acting as a proxy. Check it out...

:happy2:

So there you have it folks... Very BBC compliant though. :)

BTW you may want to try rss2book - check the Sony Reader forums under Content subforum; its one of the sticky threads.

rss2book has had some very cool extensions recently, for supporting getting full stories, not just the limited RSS descriptions - check it out!

I was reading this forum's threads and I thought it was worth pointing out that there's a new site (http://www.rss2.co.uk) that allows not only mashing several RSS2 feeds onto a single PDF document but also free webmaster tools that allow websites to provide the same service at no cost.

Enjoy!!!
Iván