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danburzo/percollate

★ 4,628JavaScriptAudience · generalComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A command-line tool that fetches web pages, strips ads and clutter, and saves them as clean PDFs, EPUBs, HTML, or Markdown files, useful for offline reading, archiving, or converting documentation.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((percollate))
    What it does
      Web page archiving
      Clutter stripping
      Format conversion
    Output formats
      PDF
      EPUB
      HTML
      Markdown
    Features
      RSS feed support
      Custom CSS
      Multiple URLs
    Setup
      Node.js required
      npm global install
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Save a long article or documentation page as a clean, ad-free PDF for offline reading.

USE CASE 2

Bundle multiple web pages or an entire RSS feed into a single EPUB ebook.

USE CASE 3

Archive a blog series into a self-contained HTML file with embedded images for long-term storage.

USE CASE 4

Convert web documentation to Markdown for editing or re-publishing in another format.

Tech stack

JavaScriptNode.jsnpmPuppeteer

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

Requires Node.js 14.17.0 or later, Puppeteer downloads a bundled Chromium browser on first install.

In plain English

Percollate is a command-line tool that saves web pages as readable documents in your choice of format. You give it one or more URLs, and it fetches those pages, strips away the navigation bars, ads, and other clutter, and produces a clean PDF, EPUB, HTML, or Markdown file. It is the kind of tool you would use to save a long article for offline reading, archive a series of documentation pages into a single file, or convert a blog feed into an ebook. The tool runs from a terminal and is installed via npm, a standard package manager for JavaScript. The basic usage is straightforward: you type a command like percollate pdf https://example.com and specify where you want the output to go. You can pass multiple URLs to bundle them together into one file, or use a flag to get a separate file for each URL. It also supports reading RSS and Atom web feeds, treating each entry in the feed as a separate article. There are options for customizing the output, including adding a title, author name, cover page, and table of contents. You can also apply custom CSS styles to change how the PDF or HTML looks, and embed images directly into HTML files so the result is self-contained. For Markdown output, there are options that control formatting details like how emphasis and links are written. Under the hood, percollate uses a library called Readability (the same one behind Firefox Reader View) to extract the main content from a page, and Puppeteer to render and capture the output. This means it can handle pages that load content with JavaScript, not just simple static HTML. The project is installable globally from npm and requires Node.js version 14.17.0 or later. Community packages are also available for Arch Linux users through the Arch User Repository.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Use percollate to save this URL as a PDF with a table of contents, the author's name, and a custom CSS style that widens the margins.
Prompt 2
I have an RSS feed URL. Use percollate to download all entries and bundle them into a single EPUB ebook.
Prompt 3
Convert three documentation page URLs into one PDF using percollate and apply custom CSS to make the output print-friendly.
Prompt 4
Save a JavaScript-heavy web page to Markdown using percollate and explain which flags control how links and emphasis are formatted in the output.
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