marcj/papernews

papernews is a personal news reading tool that converts RSS feeds and Hacker News into a single PDF, formatted to look like a quiet academic paper or old magazine rather than a web page. The author built it because they disliked switching between multiple sites with different layouts, advertisements, and visual clutter. The result is one PDF per day with consistent typography, no color, and full article text rather than summaries, readable entirely offline. The tool works in four stages. First it fetches the full article text from each source you configure. Second it uses Claude (an AI model by Anthropic) to produce a short two-sentence summary of each article. Third it asks Claude to rewrite the full article body into clean, consistently styled prose and to translate any non-English content into English if you want that. Fourth it renders everything through a LaTeX typesetting system into a PDF with a cover page, table of contents, two-column article layout, and proper formatting for math and code. Setup runs in Docker. You clone the repository, paste your Anthropic API key into a configuration file, edit a sources file to list which RSS feeds and how many articles from each, then run the container. A web server at localhost port 8000 serves the current PDF. The first build takes a minute or two, after that results are cached and a background process refreshes the content every four hours. The PDF is designed to be sent to an e-ink device like the reMarkable tablet. The README describes a few ways to do this: manually downloading and uploading through the device's web interface, using a third-party command-line tool on a cron schedule, or emailing the file to an email-to-device bridge. You can customize the output by editing the LaTeX template to change page size, fonts, or layout, and by editing the rewrite prompt to change the editorial voice or disable the English translation step. The project is described as a hobby tool that works but may have rough edges.