microform

microform is a command-line utility for reading articles in the terminal. It uses Mercury Web Parser and tomd (an HTML to Markdown converter) to fetch a web page and generate a readable, markdown version of its content. microform serves a purpose similar to other "reader" services, such as Readability, Safari Reader, Firefox Reader View, Instapaper.

microform makes use of requests-cache to cache responses from Mercury Web Parser. The default database is a mercury.sqlite file. However, you can configure microform to use a DB name of your choice, by setting the MERCURY_DB_NAME environment variable.

Note: In general, I've found Mercury Web Parser to be very good, but there are some cases when it fails to correctly parse an article that other services (such as Firefox Reader View or Instapaper) parse correctly. If your article seems to start in the middle or seems truncated, this is likely why. I'm open to ideas on how to improve this and interested in allowing users to configure microform with their preferred parser. Pull requests addressing these issues are very welcome.

Installation & Configuration

pip install microform

The only required environment variable that must be set is MERCURY_API_KEY, which should be set to the API key provided to you by Mercury Web Parser.

Other configuration options include:

• MERCURY_DB_NAME: name of the sqlite db where cached reponses from Mercury Web Parser are stored.
• MICROFORM_PAGER: The pager that will be launched to display your article

Requirements

• Python 3
• requests
• requests-cache
• tomd

Usage

microform https://foo.com/barticle

You can convert links to references, with a set of endnotes appearing at the end of the article by using the --refs option:

microform https://foo.com/barticle.com --refs

Note: Before using, you must set the MERCURY_API_KEY to the API key provided to you by Mercury Web Parser.

Pagers

microform defaults to printing your article to stdout. However, using a pager is much more enjoyable!

You can set microform to use your pager of choice by setting the MICROFORM_PAGER environment variable.

For example, export MICROFORM_PAGER="less" will allow you to read your article in less.

I'm particularly fond of using vim in read-only mode — in conjunction with the Goyo and vim-markdown plugins — as my pager.

My current MICROFORM_PAGER env var is set to view -c "Goyo 50%x10%%", which will launch your article in Vim in read-only mode and uses the Goyo plugin to format the width and height of the resulting text. Syntax highlighting is handled by vim-markdown.

Screenshot

Here's an example of the output using the configuration described above. The example article is http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/07/water-moon-formed-volcanoes-glass-space-science/.