fiction-dl 1.4.0

A fiction downloader, capable of retrieving works of fiction from the net and saving them in afew common file formats.

fiction-dl (1.4.0)

fiction-dl is a command-line utility used for downloading works of fiction from the web, formatting them and storing them in a few common file formats. It requires a Python interpreter installed, version 3.8 or higher.

I've created it mostly as an exercise in Python - the good old FanFicFare serves the same purpose and has a much longer list of supported sites. It can also update already downloaded stories, not to mention that it can be used as a Calibre plug-in just as well as a command-line tool! But with all that said, fiction-dl does have some adventages over FFF:

• It supports some sites FFF doesn't (Reddit).
• It can generate ODT and PDF files.
• It applies some typographic corrections to downloaded texts.
• It has much more verbose output.

Features

Downloading stories

fiction-dl is capable of downloading stories from following sites:

Fanfiction

• Archive of Our Own.
• FanFiction.net.
• SpaceBattles.com. (Supports user authentication.)
• SufficientVelocity.com. (Supports user authentication.)
• AlternateHistory.com. (Supports user authentication.)

Original Fiction

• Fiction Press.
• Reddit. (Supports user authentication.)

Erotica

• AdultFanFiction.
• Literotica.

Other

• Raw text files. You can put the HTML-formatted story in a raw text file and use fiction-dl to auto-format it as ODT, PDF etc.

Formatting stories

Downloaded stories can be saved in following file formats:

• HTML (.html).
• EPUB (.epub).
• OpenDocument (.odt).
• Portable Document Format (.pdf).

(Creating PDF output files requires LibreOffice installed on the machine.)

Embedding images

The application can download images found in story content and embed them in output files.

Typographic corrections

fiction-dl can apply basic typographic corrections to the content of downloaded stories. For example:

Source Text	Corrected Text
Lorem ipsum... dolor.	Lorem ipsum… dolor.
Lorem ipsum...dolor.	Lorem ipsum… dolor.
Lorem ipsum...... dolor.	Lorem ipsum… dolor.
Lorem ipsum , dolor.	Lorem ipsum, dolor.
Lorem ipsum????? Dolor.	Lorem ipsum? Dolor.
Lorem ipsum - dolor.	Lorem ipsum — dolor.

Installation

You can install fiction-dl using pip:

pip install --upgrade fiction-dl

If the package's already installed, this command will also update it.

If you're running a Debian-derived Linux distribution, you might also want to install the following packages:

apt-get install libgl1-mesa-glx libglib2.0-0 libmupdf-dev

(fiction-dl uses OpenCV for processing downloaded images, which requires them to be installed. PyMuPDF requires libmupdf-dev when it's being build from source.)

Usage

To download a story from a URL, simply type:

fiction-dl URL

In order to download multiple stories, create a text file and place the URLs in it, each one in a separate line. Then type:

fiction-dl YourFilesName

fiction-dl offers a few options - you can view them using following command:

fiction-dl -h

Using the Text File Extractor

Create a text file meant to contain the story. In its first lines type:

LOCAL TEXT STORY
*URL*
*The Title of the Story*
*The Author*
*The One-Line Summary*

Follow it by the story's content, wrapped in HTML tags. Then call:

fiction-dl FilePath.txt

You can insert chapter-breaks in the story by typing "CHAPTER BREAK LINE" in an empty line.

License

GNU GPL 3. The text of the license is provided in the LICENSE file.

Changelog

All changelogs can be found in the Docs/Changelogs directory.

Technical

Documentation

You can generate code documentation using Doxygen; the relevant configuration file is Docs/Docs.doxygen. Generated files will appear in the Docs/Code Documentation directory.

Tests

Launching the Integration Test can be done by entering the Tests directory and executing the following code:

python "Integration Test"

In order to launch unit tests, enter the Tests directory and execute:

python "Unit Tests.py"