Show HN: Papernews – self-hosted daily newspaper PDF for your reMarkable

A developer released Papernews, a self-hosted tool that aggregates RSS feeds and Hacker News content into a single daily PDF designed for e-ink readers like the reMarkable. The script uses Anthropic's Claude to rewrite full article text into a consistent LaTeX typeset format with quiet typography and no ads or visual noise. The project requires Docker and an Anthropic API key, generating offline-readable PDFs that users can push to their devices manually or via cron jobs.

Every news site looks different. Hacker News, MacRumors, Quanta, my favourite ML blog, my favourite math blog — each one its own layout, fonts, colors, ads. To read anything I had to wade through somebody's design choices first and focus past the visual noise. I much prefer reading the way a LaTeX paper or an old magazine looks: quiet typography, generous margins, no color, nothing competing for attention. papernews is the fix. A script pulls all those feeds, has Claude clean up, translate to English, and rewrite the article bodies — the full text , not just summaries — and renders the result into one consistently typeset LaTeX PDF. Every article is in the PDF; you read entirely offline, no clicking through, no opening tabs. A side benefit I didn't expect to like but very much do: one place to read the day's news instead of five tabs being refreshed all day. One or two issues per day, no more. Designed for an e-ink reader like the reMarkable, but it works just as well in any browser's PDF viewer. 👉 See sample-2026-06-04.pdf for a real day's output.Hobby project; works. Things will move. Expect rough edges. You need: a machine that can run Docker your laptop, a NAS, a $5/mo VPS, anything , an Anthropic API key https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys , and ~2 GB of disk for the image. 1 Pull git clone https://github.com/marcj/papernews cd papernews 2 Configure your key cp .env.example .env $EDITOR .env paste ANTHROPIC API KEY=sk-ant-... 3 Pick your sources $EDITOR sources.toml add/remove RSS/HN entries, set per-source limits 4 Optional Tweak the look $EDITOR papernews/template.tex.j2 5 Build + run docker compose up --build -d Open http://localhost:8000 First PDF builds on demand and is cached. Background ingest runs every 4h. Everything you'd normally want to change is in two files : — which feeds, how many items per feed, in what order. Two source kinds today: sources.toml kind = "hn" Hacker News, top-by-points via the Algolia API and kind = "rss" any Atom/RSS feed via feedparser .— the LaTeX template. Page size, fonts, colors, layout, what goes on the cover, everything. Edit, restart the container, refresh papernews/template.tex.j2 /digest.pdf . Optional but useful: + papernews/summarize.py — the Claude system prompts. Change papernews/rewrite.py MODEL to claude-sonnet-4-6 for fancier rewrites at ~10× the cost; adjust SYSTEM to change the editorial voice e.g. disable the auto-translate-to-English rule .— what goes into the World news block and the Quote-of-the-day source. papernews/wiki.py A few different ways, no special script needed: Manual — open http://your-machine:8000/digest.pdf in a browser on your phone/laptop and upload it to your reMarkable from there drag-and- drop on my.remarkable.com , or the reMarkable mobile app, or the USB Web Interface at http://10.11.99.1 while connected by USB .— a third-party CLI that pushes files to your reMarkable cloud account. Pair once, then: rmapi Stick that two-liner in cron on the host and the device picks it up on next sync automatically. curl -s http://your-machine:8000/digest.pdf -o today.pdf rmapi put today.pdf /Papernews — a third-party email-to-reMarkable bridge Remailable https://github.com/remailable/remailable remailable.getneutrality.org https://remailable.getneutrality.org . You email the PDF as an attachment to your assigned address and it appears on the device. Useful if your papernews host can mail / mutt but can't reach the reMarkable directly. reMarkable has no first-party email-to-device; do not believe earlier versions of this README that implied otherwise. No native push is built-in because everyone's setup is different and you probably don't want me poking your reMarkable cloud account with your token. git clone https://github.com/yourname/papernews cd papernews cp .env.example .env paste your ANTHROPIC API KEY into .env get one at https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys docker compose up --build Then visit http://localhost:8000 — landing page with a preview image and a link to /digest.pdf . The first PDF builds on demand, takes ~1–2 minutes the first time and is then cached until new content arrives. State lives in ./data/state.db bind-mounted from the host so it survives container restarts. A 100–200 page PDF with: Cover page : title + date + article count, quote of the day from Wikiquote, a "World news" block 5 tech headlines + 2 Western items from Wikipedia's Current Events portal, each compressed to a single sentence . Contents : every article grouped by source, with dot-leaders to its publication date. "Did you know…" trivia nuggets from Wikipedia's Main Page. The articles themselves , set in two-column Latin Modern with proper paragraph indents, hyphenation, microtypography. Math $x = y$ , $$\int f$$ , \ ...\ , \ ...\ is rendered as real LaTeX math. Code blocks fenced or inline come through in monospace.- All non-English source content heise, etc. is translated to English during the rewrite step. You can disable that in the prompt if you don't want it. sources.toml │ ┌──────────┴──────────┐ │ │ ▼ ▼ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ │ gather │ │ wiki/ │ │ HN + │ │ news + │ │ RSS │ │ QOTD │ └───┬────┘ └───┬────┘ ▼ │ ┌────────┐ │ │extract │ │ │ traf- │ │ │ ilatura │ └───┬────┘ │ ▼ │ ┌─────────┐ │ │summarize│ ─── Claude │ └───┬─────┘ │ ▼ │ ┌─────────┐ │ │ rewrite │ ─── Claude │ └───┬─────┘ │ ▼ ▼ SQLite store state.db in-memory │ │ └──────────┬──────────┘ ▼ ┌──────────┐ │ render │ ── xelatex └────┬─────┘ ▼ archive/cache/<hash .pdf Four stages, each idempotent and resumable: gather — pulls new items from each source, runs trafilatura to extract the article body, stores the raw text. Pure I/O — no LLM cost. summarize — batches up to 8 articles per Claude call and produces a ≤40-word two-sentence summary for each used as the lede in the front matter and in the contents listing . rewrite — batches up to 8 articles per Claude call streamed because the output is long and produces a clean, properly-paragraphed, translated-to-English version of each article body for the renderer. Preserves code fences and $math$ exactly. render — pulls the latest N articles per source from the store, plus fresh world news + quote + DYK, and runs them through a Jinja template into xelatex → PDF. Results are cached by a hash of "what's in the store" + "what's in sources.toml". Same content + same config → same cached PDF served instantly. A background APScheduler job runs steps 1–3 every 4 hours configurable . The render step is on-demand; the first hit to /digest.pdf after an ingest builds the PDF and caches it. | route | what it does | |---|---| GET / | minimal landing page, cover preview + Read PDF link | GET /digest.pdf | the current edition built on demand, then cached | GET /preview.png | page 1 rasterized at 180 DPI | GET /sources | JSON list of configured sources + latest fetched at | GET /healthz | liveness probe returns ok | POST /ingest | manual kick of the gather → summarize → rewrite cycle | Sources live in sources.toml /marcj/papernews/blob/main/sources.toml — that's the exact file used to produce the sample PDF /marcj/papernews/blob/main/sample-2026-06-04.pdf . Open it, copy a block, edit, restart the container, refresh /digest.pdf .The order of source blocks in the file is the order they'll appear in the PDF — sources at the top come first. World news, quote of the day, and the "Did you know…" nuggets are not configured here — they're cover decorations, fetched fresh on every render. Ranks stories by points within a time window. No URL needed; the API is hardcoded. | field | type | default | meaning | |---|---|---|---| name | string | required | display label also the contents-page heading | kind | string | required | must be "hn" | limit | int | 10 | how many top stories to keep | since hours | int | 48 | only consider stories submitted in the last N hours | min points | int | 50 | story must have at least this many points to qualify | source name = "Hacker News" kind = "hn" limit = 10 since hours = 48 min points = 100 Parsed with feedparser https://feedparser.readthedocs.io/ , so it accepts RSS 0.9/1.0/2.0 and Atom 1.0 — every blog and most news sites work. | field | type | default | meaning | |---|---|---|---| name | string | required | display label also the contents-page heading | kind | string | required | must be "rss" | url | string | required | feed URL | limit | int | 20 | take at most N most-recent items | source name = "Quanta Magazine" kind = "rss" url = "https://www.quantamagazine.org/feed/" limit = 8 The limit is applied twice , on purpose: - At fetch time: gather doesn't pull more than limit items from the feed saves bandwidth and trafilatura time . - At render time: even if the store accumulates more than limit items for a source across multiple ingests it will — items don't get deleted , only the latest limit per source make it into a given PDF. So if you want Quanta to have at most 8 articles in the issue, regardless of how many they've published this week → set limit = 8 . If you want Hacker News to show only the top 5 by points in the last 24h → set limit = 5, since hours = 24 . On the totals.Adding up every limit in sources.toml gives you the maximum article count per issue. Aim for30–60 articlesfor a comfortable 30–60 minute read. Claude's summaries are dense; volume isn't quality. An empty section on a slow day is cleaner than padding. Two modes; pick whichever fits your routine. Set the env var in .env . .env INGEST INTERVAL SECONDS=14400 4 hours the default .env INGEST SCHEDULE=07:00,18:00 comma-separated HH:MM INGEST TIMEZONE=Europe/London any IANA tz; default UTC If both are set, INGEST SCHEDULE wins. The render is still on-demand — hitting /digest.pdf between scheduled runs gives you the cached PDF instantly. You can also kick a manual ingest any time: curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/ingest A built-in hook fires after every successful ingest. Point POST INGEST HOOK at any executable on the container's filesystem drop the script into your ./data/hooks/ directory so it survives rebuilds via the bind mount . The hook receives the freshly-built PDF path as its first argument. .env POST INGEST HOOK=/data/hooks/push-to-remarkable.sh POST INGEST HOOK TIMEOUT=300 optional; default 300s Hook failures are non-fatal — a broken hook logs an error but doesn't crash the ingest loop. Drop this in ./data/hooks/push-to-remarkable.sh and chmod +x it: bash /usr/bin/env bash Push the latest issue to a reMarkable 2 via SSH. Usage: push-to-remarkable.sh <pdf-path set -euo pipefail PDF="$1" REMARKABLE="root@10.11.99.1" adjust to your device's IP SSH KEY=/data/hooks/remarkable id ed25519 scp -i "$SSH KEY" -o StrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new \ "$PDF" "$REMARKABLE:/home/root/papernews.pdf" Refresh the UI so the file appears immediately. ssh -i "$SSH KEY" "$REMARKABLE" 'systemctl restart xochitl' Generate a passwordless key ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f data/hooks/remarkable id ed25519 -N "" , add the .pub to the reMarkable's /home/root/.ssh/authorized keys once, and from then on every ingest pushes the new paper to your device. The same pattern works for Kindle scp over USB networking , a network printer lp -d papernews "$PDF" , an email mutt -a "$PDF" , or anything else you can script. Modest, no-network unittest suite for the web/scheduling/hook behaviour: python -m unittest discover -s tests You don't have to use Docker — the CLI works directly: python3 -m venv .venv .venv/bin/pip install -e . export ANTHROPIC API KEY=sk-ant-... .venv/bin/python -m papernews gather fetch + extract .venv/bin/python -m papernews summarize claude pass 1 batched .venv/bin/python -m papernews rewrite claude pass 2 batched, streamed .venv/bin/python -m papernews render xelatex → PDF or all of the above in sequence: .venv/bin/python -m papernews build Requirements: Python 3.11+, xelatex TeX Live with texlive-xetex , texlive-latex-extra , lmodern , pdftoppm poppler . Everything visual lives in one file: papernews/template.tex.j2 /marcj/papernews/blob/main/papernews/template.tex.j2 . - Page size: paperwidth=157mm, paperheight=210mm tuned for reMarkable Pro - Body font: Latin Modern Roman 10pt - Two-column body for any article over 2000 characters; single-column otherwise - First-line paragraph indent instead of vertical \parskip classic magazine convention - Microtype protrusion + expansion - Letter-spacing on small-caps source labels via fontspec's LetterSpace Customize whatever you like — the Jinja delimiters are LaTeX-safe ... for blocks, ... for variables so your { , } and \ don't fight each other. Roughly per ingest cycle, with Claude Haiku 4.5 default model : - ~50 articles - Summarize: 6 batched calls ~8 articles each - Rewrite: 6 batched calls, streamed - World-news compress: 1 call Order-of-magnitude: a few cents to a few tens of cents per cycle depending on article lengths. At 6 cycles/day that's well under $1/day. Going to Sonnet or Opus multiplies the bill ~10–30×. Set a spend cap at https://console.anthropic.com/settings/billing https://console.anthropic.com/settings/billing → Spend limits — the run-loop can't surprise you above whatever you set. - All data lives on your machine ./data/state.db + ./data/archive/cache/ . - Article text is sent to the Anthropic API for summarization and rewriting. That's the only outbound destination for content besides fetching the feeds themselves . - No analytics, no telemetry, no third-party scripts in the landing page. papernews/ ├── papernews/ │ ├── fetch.py HN Algolia + RSS feedparser │ ├── extract.py trafilatura │ ├── summarize.py Anthropic SDK, batched │ ├── rewrite.py Anthropic SDK, batched + streamed │ ├── wiki.py World news / Quote / DYK / tech feeds │ ├── store.py SQLite article store + queries │ ├── render.py Jinja + xelatex │ ├── preview.py PDF → PNG via pdftoppm │ ├── cache.py On-disk cache by content hash │ ├── cli.py papernews command │ ├── web.py Flask + APScheduler │ └── template.tex.j2 the magazine ├── sources.toml configured feeds ├── pyproject.toml ├── Dockerfile ├── docker-compose.yml └── data/ gitignored — your SQLite + cached PDFs Open an issue first if you're planning something non-trivial — happy to talk about direction. The codebase is small enough that you can read it end to end in an hour. MIT — see LICENSE /marcj/papernews/blob/main/LICENSE . Working name; happy to take suggestions. The vibe is: an old-fashioned daily paper, not a feed. You read it once, then you put it down.