papernews

papernews subcommand

papernews is a self-hosted tool that turns RSS feeds and Hacker News stories into one consistently typeset PDF. It fetches sources listed in sources.toml, extracts article bodies, uses Claude to summarize and rewrite them, and renders the result with xelatex.The output is meant for calm offline reading on e-ink devices such as a reMarkable, but any PDF viewer works. A typical edition contains a cover page, table of contents, world-news snippets, and full article text set in two-column Latin Modern typography.In server mode, papernews exposes / for a landing page and /digest.pdf for the current cached edition. A background scheduler reruns ingest on a fixed interval or cron schedule. State is stored locally in SQLite, so content survives restarts.Configured sources can be Hacker News rankings or any Atom/RSS feed. Non-English articles can be translated to English during the rewrite step.

gather

Pull new items from configured sources and extract article text

Generate short ledes for fetched articles

Produce clean, translated article bodies for rendering

Build a LaTeX PDF from stored articles

Run gather, summarize, rewrite, and render in sequence

Start the HTTP service with background ingest and PDF delivery

sources.toml

Defines feed order, source kind (hn or rss), limits, and HN filtering thresholds

Controls page size, fonts, cover layout, and article formatting

Holds ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and ingest schedule variables such as INGEST_INTERVAL_SECONDS or INGEST_SCHEDULE

Summarize and rewrite steps call the Anthropic API, so article text leaves the machine for processing. Gather and render stay local.Rendering requires xelatex and related TeX packages. The first PDF build can take one to two minutes before caching makes later requests fast.This is a hobby project; configuration and output quality may change between versions.

curl(1), docker(1)