Removing links from downloaded news

[scampos]

Hi all,

I often download news using Calibre, but I am old fashioned and want to read the text sequentially, and therefore do not like links in the downloaded document. Actually I sometimes select a link and then uneeded things happen, such as trying to visit a web site or something. Since I use my Kindle in airplane mode it is rather annoying.

The question is, how can I remove links from a downloaded news file ? Or better yet, how can I make sure that no link is generated ?

Thanks in advance,
Sergio.

[kovidgoyal]

You can edit the news recipe and add

remove_attributes = ['href']

to it.

[scampos]

Thanks, but how can I edit the news recipe ? How do I get it ? When I select Fetch news and click download I see no option for editing the recipe or downloading it.

[kovidgoyal]

Right click the fetch news button and choose add or edit custom news source

[scampos]

Thank you. I did get that far, but I forgot to mention that I don't want to start from scratch. i use mostly the The Economist recipe. How can I get so that I can modify it ?

[kovidgoyal]

Click the customize builtin recipe button to edit an existing builting recipe

[scampos]

Thanks. I did find how to download the recipe and change it.

Unfortunately adding remove_attributes = ["href"] to the recipe did not work.

I still get links. I guess because this has been downloaded as a web page, the links point to the original pages in the web site.

I tried to convert the file. I went into the Look & feel options, Transform HTML tab, and added a rule that if a tag is [href] I remove it, but that did not work either. Is there a way of converting the file to remove the links ?

[kovidgoyal]

remove_attributes = ['href'] works fine, as does using transform HTML to remove the href attribute, though running an extra convert to use the latter will destroy amazon specific periodical formatting.

[scampos]

I see. Perhaps you can help me find what I did wrong. I am attaching the .recipe file below. In this week's The Economist on the very first paragraph of the weekly news there a link under the word Syria that was not removed. Perhaps I modified the recipe wrong ?

Using conversion, I don't mind losing the specific formatting, I am already converting it for another reason. To remove the href in the conversion should I type the tag name as href or 'href' or [href] or ['href'] or something else ?

Thanks again.

[kovidgoyal]

In your recipe, locate the existing remove_attributes and add href to it.

[scampos]

Ah, ok, so it was not add a remove_attributes line, but to add 'href' to an existing remove_attributes line, I get it now.

Thanks Kovid, it worked.