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Save xkcd to a pdf with captions

Terminal - Save xkcd to a pdf with captions
curl -sL xkcd.com | grep '<img [^>]*/><br/>' | sed -r 's|<img src="(.*)" title="(.*)" alt="(.*)" /><br/>|\1\t\2\t\3|' > /tmp/a; curl -s $(cat /tmp/a | cut -f1) | convert - -gravity south -draw "text 0,0 \"$(cat /tmp/a | cut -f2)\"" pdf:- > xkcd.pdf
2010-03-03 03:41:31
User: matthewbauer
Functions: cat cut grep sed
6
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Save xkcd to a pdf with captions

Saves to a PDF with title and alt text of comic.

As asked for on http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=91100

Change xkcd.com to dynamic.xkcd.com/comics/random for a random comic.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

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What others think

Error:

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `s' @ draw.c/DrawImage/3123.

Result:

Alt text garbled

Comment by oshazard 171 weeks and 5 days ago

convert: unable to read font `/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/arial.ttf'.

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `m'.

Comment by SuperFly 171 weeks and 5 days ago

convert: unable to read font `/usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType/arial.ttf'.

if you got this, try this:

add -font "helvetica" to the convert command

e.g.: ...| convert -font "helvetica" png:- ...

this:

convert: Non-conforming drawing primitive definition `m'.

is still coming up, but you'll see the text in the pdf

Comment by nbk1971 171 weeks and 5 days ago

nice, but didn't work - same problem as comments above

Comment by leovailati 171 weeks and 5 days ago

I think I've fixed those problems please try it again.

Remember it saves to a pdf file so you should have an "xkcd.pdf" in your local directory.

Comment by matthewbauer 171 weeks and 5 days ago

It worked aces for me; I was the first to give it a thumbs up. :P

Something I've considered giving a go, but have yet to - converting it to vector and doubling (or tripling) in size before saving to pdf. Also it would be pretty sweet to name each pdf "comicNumber.pdf" rather than just xkcd.pdf. If I could do that, and successfully achieve the vector "zoom" effect, i'd totally make this a daily cron. :)

Comment by trench 171 weeks and 4 days ago

There is no need for the temp file. You can use convert on a URL. So the major thing might be

IMG=`curl -sL xkcd.com| grep '<img [^>]*/><br/>'|awk -F\" '{print $2}'`;convert $IMG -gravity south -draw "text 0,0 \"$IMG\"" pdf:- > xkcd.pdf
Comment by houghi 171 weeks and 4 days ago

@trench

Try this:

number=100; for a in $(seq 1 $number); do curl -sL xkcd.com/$a | grep '<img [^>]*/><br/>' | sed -r 's|<img src="(.*)" title="(.*)" alt="(.*)" /><br/>|\1\t\2\t\3|' > /tmp/a; curl -s $(cat /tmp/a | cut -f1) | convert - -gravity south -draw "text 0,0 \"$(cat /tmp/a | cut -f2)\"" pdf:- > /tmp/$a.pdf; done; gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=xkcd.pdf $(seq 1 $number | sed -r 's/(.*)/\/tmp\/\1.pdf/'); rm /tmp/a /tmp/*.pdf
Comment by matthewbauer 171 weeks and 4 days ago

@houghi

The problem is it gives the URL of the xkcd comic not the alt text

@trench

Actually this is more what you want:

number=100; mkdir xkcd; for a in $(seq 1 $number); do curl -sL xkcd.com/$a | grep '<img [^>]*/><br/>' | sed -r 's|<img src="(.*)" title="(.*)" alt="(.*)" /><br/>|\1\t\2\t\3|' > /tmp/a; curl -s $(cat /tmp/a | cut -f1) | convert - -gravity south -draw "text 0,0 \"$(cat /tmp/a | cut -f2)\"" pdf:- > xkcd/$a.pdf; done
Comment by matthewbauer 171 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

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