EASY fanfiction grabber?

[sherryg]

Hi!
I'm Sherry. I am technically challenged. I don't understand code and such. If you show me where to plug in a copy/pasted url I can easily do that, but I have no idea how to do anything involving code.

I use either an iPod Touch (gen 2) or a Nokia N810 for ebook reading. Not ideal I know and I'd REALLY like to have something with a bigger screen. I'm looking into either a Sony or a Kindle. I don't have Word on my laptop so I can't convert stuff (which the Sony tech specs say you have to have to be able to convert).

I am looking for an easy fan fiction grabber. I go to fanfiction.net, twilighted.net and livejournal primarily. I am starting to get into Harry Potter fanfiction so I'm sure I'll be adding sites I read from. I currently use fanfiction downloader as it does PDF (that's the format I use on the Nokia) and it's really easy. However, it doesn't support twilighted.net. I have tried emailing the writer of the program to see if there is anyway to add twilighted.net to his list of sites but I've never gotten an answer from him.

Does anyone know if there is a downloader that supports twilighted.net?

Thanks!

[EowynCarter]

For fanfiction.net, that topic will be of interest
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26055

[sherryg]

I did see that discussion and waded through it. It was so far over my head I was drowning by the send of the second page. I don't understand coding and such. Maybe I can find someone who can translate it for the programming challenged person that I am.

[bjergtrold]

You could print the story from your Browser using a PDF Printer like PDF Creator. This works very well on websites that have a special print layout without header, footer and naviation bars.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by sherryg

Hi!
I don't have Word on my laptop so I can't convert stuff (which the Sony tech specs say you have to have to be able to convert).

You may need Word for the Sony software, but you don't need it for Calibre. And the Sony reads RTF files natively. (Limited. They need a large font size to be readable--I like 17 pt base; Amalthia prefers 20--and you lose pictures.)

Does anyone know if there is a downloader that supports twilighted.net?

Not that I know of, and there probably won't be; that looks like a customized version of one of the common story-program software packages. (EFiction, maybe?)

The best method I've found for archives that don't work with ff-downloader is copy-paste into a word processing program (I prefer Word, but have worked with both OpenOffice and Abiword from time to time), reformat as necessary (someday, I'll learn to make macros), and save as RTF if I'm in a hurry, or take a bit more time to make PDFs that fit on the screen if I'm not.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by sherryg

I did see that discussion and waded through it. It was so far over my head I was drowning by the send of the second page. I don't understand coding and such. Maybe I can find someone who can translate it for the programming challenged person that I am.

The simple version:
The program grabs stories from ff.net and translates them into ebooks. It does so in several possible formats. It doesn't grab them from other archives, so it's not directly useful to you; ff downloader already works with ff.net.

FLAG is slightly buggy, and ff.net occasionally changes their coding, which makes the program not work, or not work well. Skip the coding discussions; those are attempts to fix it. I don't understand them either.

I do keep http://www.utterlyinsane.org/fflag/print.php?storyid= as a bookmark, because putting the story# at the end will get me the HTML of the story, which I can save/reformat as I wish.

[cklammer]

There is also Fanfiction Downloader which is a Windows software. It will take the user through four easy steps to generate output. You need to know how to cut and paste URL from your web browser in the program and you need to know what files are and how and where to save them.

This is copied from the download page:

Fanfiction Downloader

Problems? Questions? Click here!

Because I like to read the fanfictions from fanfiction.net offline (thanks to my Palm), I had to copy chapter by chapter to Microsoft Word and send the whole file to my Palm.
Now, after 3 years and hundreds of fanfictions it was so uncomfortable that I've written a program which is able to do this automatically.

I'm thinking bout porting the whole project to JAVA because then it'd be OS independent (Linux/MAC/Windows). Please mail me if you know JAVA/Netbeans very well.

Download v.4.0.4 Fanfictiondownloader.exe (recommended) (1.3 MB) Changelog

alternativ:

Download v.4.0.4 Fanfictiondownloader.rar (1.1 Mb)
Download v.4.0.4 Fanfictiondownloader.zip (1.3 Mb)



Select your favourite outputocument, HTML, PDF or now new: Mopipocket Ebook!!

Supported Pages:
- fanfiction.net
- fanfiktion.de
- checkmated.com
- portkey.org
- adultfanfiction.net
- Animexx.de (test)
- Fictionalley.org (schnoogle, astronomy....)
- Fictionpress.com
- FanFicAuthors.net

I hope this is helpful,
cklammer

[Amalthia]

I think with twilight.net it's an efiction archive?

when you're at a story that has multiple chapters if you add this code to the end of the url

?action=printable&textsize=0&sid=1&chapter=all

(You may have to change the sid number to match the sid number on the story you'd like a single file version for)

it should place all the chapters into a single file. I don't know why they don't have that activiated which makes me think that maybe it's not an efiction based archive.

I read RTF on my Sony PRS-505 all the time because it's the fastest method to get ebooks on my device. I would recommend BookIt plugin for Firefox (do a search on mobile read) however the select to LRF feature isn't working for some reason. But if it did work I imagine for single file LJ stories this would be handy.

For LJ I merge the fics using Word and then I have some macros that help me clean up the file and resize the text.

For stories I really like (and because I run the Ebook Library) I do convert the stories to LRF/Epub/and Mobi.

I recommend you check out the LJ community fanfic_ebooks I have tutorials and screen caps of how I'm accomplishing this.

The short answer is I use Word 97 (that's Microsoft Office 97 from 1997 to be clear) I open the RTF in Word 97 and save as an HTML, then I copy the code into a Word 2007 document and run macros on it to clean up the code.

After I finish my last research paper I had planned to make a tutorial for macros.

Anyways, once I have the a clean version of HTML I import into Calibre and convert to LRF. At the LJ fanfic_ebooks community I have my settings listed and more exact details.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

I think with twilight.net it's an efiction archive?

when you're at a story that has multiple chapters if you add this code to the end of the url

?action=printable&textsize=0&sid=1&chapter=all

Attempts to add this to twilighted.net stories gets a warning:
Access denied. This story has not been validated by the adminstrators of this site.

Maybe they've turned off that feature so that people will be forced to click through the chapters?

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Attempts to add this to twilighted.net stories gets a warning:
Access denied. This story has not been validated by the adminstrators of this site.

Maybe they've turned off that feature so that people will be forced to click through the chapters?

that is quite evil if that's the case.

Why is the story showing up if it's not validated?

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

that is quite evil if that's the case.

Why is the story showing up if it's not validated?

The story shows up, 1 chapter at a time. It's possible the combined all-in-one view hasn't been validated, or that that it hasn't been turned on, resulting in an "unvalidated" warning.

I don't know anything about efiction's settings (or if the site is efiction based); I'd thought that was a generic "unauthorized" warning that hadn't been customized to match the specific activity.

[texasnightowl]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

I think with twilight.net it's an efiction archive?

when you're at a story that has multiple chapters if you add this code to the end of the url

?action=printable&textsize=0&sid=1&chapter=all

(You may have to change the sid number to match the sid number on the story you'd like a single file version for)

it should place all the chapters into a single file. I don't know why they don't have that activiated which makes me think that maybe it's not an efiction based archive.

Hi! I kinda stumbled into this thread and now I have a question. I read some fanfics at a different site which says it is based on "efiction, coppermine, and phpbs with customizations". I gave a shot at using this ?action line above to see if I could combine a story. It didn't work, only showed one chapter at a time, but then I found that each chapter has a different sid! So chapter 1 had a sid of 2670 and chapter 2 had a sid of 2690! Ugh! Any way you know of to get around that wrinkle? Any tip?

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

Hi! I kinda stumbled into this thread and now I have a question. I read some fanfics at a different site which says it is based on "efiction, coppermine, and phpbs with customizations". I gave a shot at using this ?action line above to see if I could combine a story. It didn't work, only showed one chapter at a time, but then I found that each chapter has a different sid! So chapter 1 had a sid of 2670 and chapter 2 had a sid of 2690! Ugh! Any way you know of to get around that wrinkle? Any tip?

I'm thinking the site isn't an efiction site. I run an efiction archive and when you add a new chapter the story id does not change. I'm not sure how to get around the Twilight.net problem with it only displaying one chapter at a time.

One of the reasons I love the efiction archive is because it gives the users the option to read chapter by chapter or as a single file. Which gives more flexibility to the authors as well.

There have to be other twilight archives...ones that don't have black background and what looks like red fonts.

[texasnightowl]

I contacted the site admin and it is in fact an efiction site (one of the archives at sycophanthex.com) and while several of the archives are running efiction 3.1, ashwinder is only running efiction 1.1. The person they used to have on stuff who tweaked stuff is no longer around so who knows what state some of the code is in. So basically, I'll be cutting and pasting each chapter into Word.

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by texasnightowl

I contacted the site admin and it is in fact an efiction site (one of the archives at sycophanthex.com) and while several of the archives are running efiction 3.1, ashwinder is only running efiction 1.1. The person they used to have on stuff who tweaked stuff is no longer around so who knows what state some of the code is in. So basically, I'll be cutting and pasting each chapter into Word.

Okay wow yeah that would make sense for why there isn't a print button I don't think that came out until efiction 2.