Activity: Mar, 2026 - Mar, 2026

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Zeitung

For comments and ideas, please send issues and code-patches to: jayvii+zeitung[AT]posteo[DOT]de.

About

A thin script around perlanet and morss that gathers news from a pre-defined set of sources and formats them for newspaper-style consumption in various formats, such as:

• HTML, i.e. for any type of browser either mobile or desktop
• PDF, once in DIN A4 and once in DIN A 5 format with the Eisvogel template
• EPUB for ebook readers

Zeitung is intended to run once a day, e.g. in the very early morning, so you can get updated on the latest news once a day without falling in a habit to check news constantly all day. Of course, the script also works if you would like to update all document types multiple times a day, if you really wish to.

For example, you could generate the documents automatically every morning at 6AM on your webserver and publish them through your already running webserver, from where you can download the appropriate document to your device.

• Examplary use cases would be to read Zeitung in the morning on an E-Book reader (EPUB) or tablet (EPUB or DIN A5 PDF).
• Or read Zeitung while commuting via train on a phone (HTML or DIN A5 PDF)
• Or maybe, for you the best time for news consumption is during the evening on your computer screen (HTML or DIN A4 PDF)

Please be aware that the generate.sh script will strip out all articles that were published before yesterday. Again, this is intended to be read daily, once a day and be done with it.

General formatting, external content, graphics and advertisement is stripped from the article view as much as possible.

Name

Zeitung means newspaper in German. Very original, I know.

Screenshots

Here are some screenshot for outputs Zeitung can look like. The look is subject to change and can be adapted freely. But the screenshots below will give an impression of what Zeitung achieves and how it presents articles.

Dependencies

• Pandoc
• LaTeX / TeX Live
• XeTeX
• Source Code Pro font
• Perlanet

Optionally, install morss on your own server or use a public service like the upstream morss.it.

How to start

Copy the example perlanet config perlanetrc.example.yaml to perlanetrc.yaml and edit it accordingly. Please refer to the perlanet documentation for specifics.

For Zeitung to work properly, each feed needs both an article summary as well as the full content of the article. Most news websites do not publish the full text article within their RSS feeds. In these cases, you can use morss to fetch the full text from the article sites for you (see perlanetrc.example.yaml).

Then, run the generate.sh script. The output documents will be stored in the output/ directory.