Very nice, you should use http://viewtext.org/ API to clean the pages and comments. The PDF will be easier to read and with less pages :)

I love the idea!

I want to implement something like viewtext.org on my own server (not using an API). I recall somebody mentioning a package that did a pretty good job of cleaning up a web page but can't find it. Can anybody recommend anything?

You might want to have a look at the source of readability:

http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs-readability/source/browse...

I wonder about the copyright issue with this? It is basically packaging someone else's work and producing it in another format. I thought that is why Hacker Monthly had to contact each individual author to get permissions, or is that just because he is selling it?

HackerMonthly is repackaging several articles under a unified name. He is also putting ads on the magazine and later selling them after the first couple of issues. Not getting permission would have been both legally questionale and a dick thing to do.

This "web-app" (if I may use the word), is a simple automated way of putting multiple stories in to PDF format. You could do it yourself at home. There is no ad, reformatting, or rebranding or selling involved.

This distinction seems very obvious to me.

Is the distinction obvious if I took your blog articles and packaged them in a series of PDFs and published them on my site for download?

The distinction here is between the software and the distribution.

This is legal in the same way that software that rips MP3s from CDs is legal.

On the other hand, distributing the content isn't. So you can rip the content and use it personally, but you can't distribute it without permission.

Its a conversion tool, not a distribution tool.

That's my point. This web app is doing the content extraction and nothing else. (I can see how perhaps I wasn't clear on that)

I'm saying that it would only be illegal if he attempted to distribute the content too, which he doesn't.

OK, I misread you.

Thats not what this "web-app" is doing.

Okay, bad example. Change it so that my site provides a tool to convert your blog posts to PDF. That is basically what this web-app is doing right? Is it different if I put it on a non-app looking site (like my site)?

I understand the difference in distribution vs conversion, but it seems like this is almost a mix. I actually think this service is pretty cool, even though I hate PDFs in general... but I still had to ask. :)

I'm aware of the copyright issue. The app is free and is intended for personal use only so I hope copyright owners mostly won't mind.

Anyway, if someone complains that his/her site is included I will remove it.

Nice. But limits you to the top 10. I regularly find stuff in the 10-20 positions that I want to read. Ideally you would be able to customise the number of results and add filters to ignore articles with certain words in their title.

Very good, for people on the go. If there was a way to also include the HackerNews users' comments on it, it would be even better.

There is an 'Include comments' checkbox which does exactly this.

I really like this! It will come in handy when I travel in a few days

Honest criticism here with suggestion on how to please me.

I wasn't interested viewing a website I saw last week as a pdf. What I suggest doing is checking out how arc90 made the readability bookmarklett, scoop content that way so that it works on your pages with your own magazine-like design that isn't boring. Include top comments, and create a section for discussions (comments that get a lot of replies/nesting). I go far out of my way to un-style every website to be nice and uniform without superfluous content screaming at me from every direction (why did gopher:// have to die?!).

This is nice, but the API requires your app to communicate back to some central web server in order to function...