Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text • Hacker News Board

Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#1

Post by k1m » Mon, May 07, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text
txtify.it

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#2

Post by ksk » Mon, May 07, 2018, 10:56 PM UTC

Very Cool! I like the simple no-nonsense UI. What is your goal with the project?

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#3

Post by k1m » Mon, May 07, 2018, 11:08 PM UTC

ksk wrote: post #2

Very Cool! I like the simple no-nonsense UI. What is your goal with the project?

Thanks! :) No big goals with this. Thought it'd be a useful tool, especially considering how big and bloated web sites are getting these days. So we're going to try to keep it around as it is. It's a simple wrapper around our Full-Text RSS product, which, as of the latest release, can output plain text like this. Demo of that available here: http://95.216.144.183

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#4

Post by DrScump » Tue, May 08, 2018, 2:23 AM UTC

Nice!

Suggestion: allow larger line widths to be specified (for fewer, longer lines in large paragraphs).

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#5

Post by grblovrflowerrr » Tue, May 08, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

Hey this looks really cool. I think the typography could be improved though, check out http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for some inspiration/guidelines on how to accomplish that.

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#6

Post by k1m » Tue, May 08, 2018, 5:26 AM UTC

DrScump wrote: post #4

Nice! Suggestion: allow larger line widths to be specified (for fewer, longer lines in large paragraphs).

Thanks! I'll try to add that in the next update.

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#7

Post by k1m » Tue, May 08, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

grblovrflowerrr wrote: post #5

Hey this looks really cool. I think the typography could be improved though, check out http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ for some inspiration/guidelines on how to accomplish that.

Thanks! :) The output is literally plain text (Content-Type: text/plain).

But, I realised it's possible to send a stylesheet in the HTTP header. Chrome seems to ignore it, but Firefox uses it:

  Link: ; rel="stylesheet"

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#8

Post by z1mm32m4n » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:29 AM UTC

I’ve frequently needed to access a plain text version of a site in a bash script or from the command line. For this, I use the command

    w3m -dump

which dumps the website’s text content to stdout.

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#9

Post by k1m » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

I’ve frequently needed to access a plain text version of a site in a bash script or from the command line. For this, I use the command w3m -dump which dumps the website’s text content to stdout.

One of the things we do with txtify.it is try to find the content block in the HTML first, then convert only that from HTML to plain text. So in situations where the input URL is a news article or blog post, the output should be cleaner.

Re: Show HN: txtify.it – Easily convert web articles to plain text

#10

Post by RunningRabbit » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:38 AM UTC

k1m wrote: post #9

z1mm32m4n wrote: post #8

I’ve frequently needed to access a plain text version of a site in a bash script or from the command line. For this, I use the command w3m -dump which dumps the website’s text content to stdout.

One of the things we do with txtify.it is try to find the content block in the HTML first, then convert only that from HTML to plain text. So in situations where the input URL is a news article or blog post, the output should be cleaner.

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