RSS feed with PDFs

[Sabkor]

I have an RSS feed that is a list of 3 PDF magazines (the last three issues). It's my understanding that I cannot embed a PDF into a ePUB file, so I think somehow I'd have to download each link in the RSS feed separately and create 3 separate books from each RSS feed. Is this possible using a recipe?

Little bit about my background:

- New to ebooks, just got my first reader a couple of days ago. Have been using Sigil to create a couple of my own ebooks just to see how the ePUB format works.
- Never programmed in Python before, although I have used other non-compiled scripting languages like VBScript and PHP. If pointed in the right direction, I may be able to figure this out.

Thanks in advance for any help that you guys can provide!

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Sabkor

I have an RSS feed that is a list of 3 PDF magazines (the last three issues). It's my understanding that I cannot embed a PDF into a ePUB file, so I think somehow I'd have to download each link in the RSS feed separately and create 3 separate books from each RSS feed. Is this possible using a recipe?

Short answer: No.

More info: It's been done with links to EPUBs, but only because of how similar the EPUB structure is to an intermediate stage of recipe processing.

Long answer: Yes, it's probably possible, but you'd either have to override almost everything in the recipe system or use some outside pdf to html conversion. I haven't seen it done.

[Sabkor]

Well, thanks for the quick answer anyways, even if it's bad news!

I'll probably just use an external RSS reader, then feed them into Calibre from there.

[mlt]

Originally Posted by Starson17

Long answer: Yes, it's probably possible, but you'd either have to override almost everything in the recipe system

What is the good starting point for that?

In my case, feeds have a link to html page with links to actual content in several formats. ODT and PDF are among them. So instead of fetching just a summary, i'd like to pull either ODT and process it to MOBI or fetch PDF as is.

I thought I can just override print_version method, then I can get proper url using BeautifulSoup. However calibre tries to parse whatever it is fetching from proper url I return as if html

[mlt]

I was looking at a sample code. However I still don't get it how to fetch things if I don't have epub among other formats in the first place?

I ended up writing standalone python code that fetches all I want and calls `calibredb add`. I'd appreciate if someone can suggest as how to convert it into a recipe.

Spoiler:

#!/usr/bin/python
# vim: set fileencoding=utf-8 :

import feedparser, urllib2, tempfile, os
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

feed_url = "http://dotu.ru/feed"
feed = feedparser.parse(feed_url)

for item in feed["items"]:
    title = item["title"]
    print """Fetching "%s" """ % title
    summary = urllib2.urlopen(item["link"])
    soup = BeautifulSoup(summary)
    downloadText = soup.find(text=u"Скачать fb2")
    if None != downloadText:
        a = downloadText.findParent(name='a')
        file = tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(suffix='.fb2')
        url = a["href"]
        try:
            response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
            file.write(response.read())
            file.flush()
            cmd = u"calibredb add %s" % file.name
            cmd2 = cmd.encode('utf-8')
            os.system(cmd2)
            file.close()
        except:
            print "Failed to download %s" % url