morning-paper 0.4.1

Build a personalized daily newspaper as a print-ready PDF.

Morning Paper

Own your algorithm. Your personal newsroom.

An agent composes your newspaper. Code prints it.
Your preferences live in files you own.

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Try it

Typeset the bundled sample edition — no config, no network, no keys:

uvx --from "morning-paper[pretty]" morning-paper demo

macOS first: brew install pango gdk-pixbuf (WeasyPrint needs Pango).

Or keep it on your PATH instead of a one-off run:

uv tool install "morning-paper[pretty]"
morning-paper demo

The demo renders a fully synthetic edition through the editorial style pack and tells you exactly where the PDF landed. Print it. That is the product.

The Claude Code plugin

The plugin turns Claude Code into your newsroom staff:

/plugin marketplace add dmthepm/morning-paper
/plugin install morning-paper@morning-paper

Then say "set up my morning paper". The setup skill installs the engine, interviews you about sources and shape, and creates your private newsroom repo — your preferences as files you own, not a feed you rent. The edition skill composes and prints each day's paper.

For Agents (read this first if you are one)

Your human wants a daily printed paper. You can give them one:

1. Install: uv tool install "morning-paper[pretty]" (or pipx install "morning-paper[pretty]"; use pip only inside a venv — PEP 668 blocks it on brew/system Pythons), then morning-paper doctor. morning-paper demo proves the print path end to end.
2. If this repo is installed as a Claude Code plugin, run the setup skill — it interviews the reader, creates their private newsroom repo (preferences as files: the owned algorithm), and wires a morning routine. The edition skill composes and renders each day's paper.
3. The CLI speaks JSON. The verbs you need:
   • morning-paper stage <url> -> stages it for tomorrow and answers with a page estimate ("that adds ~5 pages")
   • morning-paper queue -> what's staged vs the page budget
   • morning-paper estimate <file.md> -> page count, nothing written
   • morning-paper render <file.md> --style <s> --palette <p> -> the PDF
   • morning-paper doctor --json -> machine-readable install status (add --strict to get a nonzero exit when the typewriter renderer is unavailable)
4. Page estimates need the pretty print stack ([pretty] + WeasyPrint): estimate fails without it, and stage falls back to a rough words-per-page heuristic instead of a real layout pass. Run morning-paper doctor first if the numbers matter.
5. URL fetching goes through the anonymous Jina Reader tier: no key needed, but rate limits and a 40-second timeout apply. Failures raise clean errors instead of staging garbage.
6. Composition contract, class vocabulary, and chart directives: docs/composing.md.
7. Honesty rule: a section with no data says "not configured" — never fabricate.

What it does

• Builds a daily paper from Hacker News and RSS feeds — JSON, Markdown, HTML, and print-ready PDF artifacts on disk
• Prints any article on demand with morning-paper print <url>
• Stages material for tomorrow's edition against a page budget (stage, queue, estimate)
• Typesets any markdown file through six print style packs with morning-paper render
• Renders charts from plain-text directives (mp-bars, mp-spark, mp-stats) as inline SVG — stdlib only, no plotting library
• Works without an LLM key

No database. No Docker. No SaaS requirement. It is not a second-brain platform, a wiki, or a closed recommendation engine — it is a CLI that prints a newspaper.

Your daily paper

uv tool install "morning-paper[pretty]"
morning-paper init      # starter config
morning-paper doctor    # must say: typewriter ready
morning-paper build     # today's edition

pipx install "morning-paper[pretty]" works the same way. Prefer either over bare pip: on Macs and Linux boxes whose default Python is Homebrew's or the distro's, pip install outside a virtual environment fails with externally-managed-environment (PEP 668), and inside an existing environment it can silently keep an older version unless you pass --upgrade. If you manage your own venv, pip install "morning-paper[pretty]" is still fine.

Artifacts land under:

~/.local/share/morning-paper/<date>/

The plain morning-paper install (no [pretty]) falls back to a simpler renderer — it works, but it is not the output you should judge the product by.

Sources

Source	Auth needed?	Status
Hacker News	No	Included
RSS feeds	No	Included
Article URLs	No	Included via print / stage

Six styles, two palettes

morning-paper styles lists them all. Every style pairs with either palette: mono (laser printers; weight carries emphasis) or color (inkjet: warm ink, working red, data blue).

Style	What it is
editorial	The unified paper: serif editorial system, restrained color — the default recommendation
typewriter	The newspaper look: Courier Prime, masthead, card sections
flow	Continuous operator brief: dense, no forced page breaks
magazine	Long-read essay page: serif body, pull quotes, wide margins
ops-card	Boxed reference one-pager: scripts, checklists, cheat sheets
zine	Pocket how-to guide: half-letter, marker display type, checkbox steps

morning-paper render brief.md --style editorial --palette color

Rendering

Two renderers, one honest contract:

• typewriter — the product look. Requires the pretty stack ([pretty] + WeasyPrint). Courier Prime ships vendored (SIL OFL), so typesetting is offline-deterministic.
• portable — explicit pure-Python fallback. Lower fidelity; use it only when you intentionally want the simpler output.

If typewriter cannot render, Morning Paper fails clearly instead of silently generating a lower-quality PDF. morning-paper doctor says plainly which path you are on, and on macOS prints the exact Pango fix when that is the problem.

Article extraction defaults to the anonymous Jina Reader tier (r.jina.ai): no API key, shared rate limits, 40-second timeout. Some domains (YouTube, GitHub, Instagram, LinkedIn, HN comment pages) do not extract meaningfully and are rejected with a clear error. A validation gate rejects shell pages and too-short extractions instead of printing garbage. Extraction is a replaceable backend; the renderer, validation, and image pipeline are designed to survive extractor upgrades.

The honesty doctrine

A section with no data prints "not configured" — never invented headlines, never filler. Page estimates come from a real layout pass when the print stack is installed. Malformed chart data degrades to an honest placeholder. If the good renderer can't run, the build fails loudly rather than quietly shipping something worse. The paper never lies to you about what it knows.

Docs

• docs/composing.md — the composition contract for agents: document structure, class vocabulary, chart directives
• ROADMAP.md — what shipped, what's next
• CHANGELOG.md — release history
• CONTRIBUTING.md — how to help

Platform notes

• macOS / Linux — recommended. Install morning-paper[pretty]; you may need system libraries for WeasyPrint (brew install pango gdk-pixbuf on macOS, pango/cairo packages on Linux).
• Windows — the CLI works; the portable fallback is the more reliable path today, and typewriter via WeasyPrint is best-effort.

Run morning-paper doctor after install: renderer: typewriter ready means you are on the real print path.

Development

git clone https://github.com/dmthepm/morning-paper.git
cd morning-paper
pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m pytest tests/
morning-paper doctor

Community

• Main Branch: skool.com/main
• Issues: github.com/dmthepm/morning-paper/issues
• Post your paper: Discussions

License

MIT