I have a digital subscription to a textbook, but it’s super annoying to have to use the website to access the book. I’d like to scrape the ebook and dump the contents into a pdf. I have downloaded proprietary pdfs from websites before using downloader browser plugins and predictable urls, but this site is pretty locked down, with randomly generated url tokens and a combination of xml and image data.
Has anyone managed to scrape a digital textbook like this? Any ideas where I should begin?
I can print pages to PDF without a VM. The problem with printing is that these books are over 1000 pages, so I need to automate a good chunk of the process. Ideally, I’d like to capture the XML text for the pdf as well as it will look much better and I will not have to manually crop 1000 PDFs with annoying borders.
Yeah, I believe you can do that by printing to a non-existent printer and then finding the file image waiting in the print queue. I don’t know if it works on Windows 11 but it used to work pretty well.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
⚓ A community devoted to in-depth debate on topics concerning digital piracy, ethical problems, and legal advancements.
I can print pages to PDF without a VM. The problem with printing is that these books are over 1000 pages, so I need to automate a good chunk of the process. Ideally, I’d like to capture the XML text for the pdf as well as it will look much better and I will not have to manually crop 1000 PDFs with annoying borders.
Yeah, I believe you can do that by printing to a non-existent printer and then finding the file image waiting in the print queue. I don’t know if it works on Windows 11 but it used to work pretty well.