pdfconvertme-public

A simplified, open-source version of pdfconvert.me for self-hosting in environments where privacy/security is a concern.

By default, it will generate the PDF but not return it via email. To change this, make sure you have a working MTA and edit bin/pdfconvertme.pl, set $email_result = 1

Required packages (available in Ubuntu 12.04/14.04):

• libtext-markdown-perl
• libhtml-fromtext-perl
• libemail-mime-perl
• libfile-slurp-perl
• libxml-feed-perl
• mpack
• poppler-utils (for pdf2text conversions)
• pandoc (for pdf2word conversions)
• A copy of a compiled wkhtmltopdf binary (I have used this version in the past, but now compile my own as described here)

The following Perl modules need to be installed from CPAN:

• HTML::ExtractMain
• HTML::HeadParser

For attachment conversions:

• libreoffice (requires universe in sources.list)
• libgxps-utils (for .xps files)
• imagemagick (for images)

Other optional packages:

• a2ps (raw text2pdf, no HTML-ification) - not enabled by default

Installation/Usage:

• Copy bin/ and etc/ to /usr/local/
• Pipe an email message to pdfconvertme.pl over stdin (I use procmail)
• Options to pdfconvertme.pl:
  • --no-headers - Don't include email headers at top of converted PDF (From/To/Subject/Date)
  • --convert-attachment - Attempt to convert the first valid attachment found in an email
  • --force-url - Convert the first URL found in a message body
  • --force-rss-url - Treat the first URL found in a message body as an RSS feed and convert the body found in the first entry
  • --force-content-url - Only retrieve the main content of the URL, similar to Readability, implies --no-headers
  • --no-javascript - Will perform web conversion requests with javascript disabled
  • --papersize <size> - Change the papersize on the resulting PDF (defaults to A4)
  • --pdf-to-text - Attempts to convert a PDF back to text only
  • --pdf-to-word - Attempts to convert a PDF to Microsoft Word format
  • --force-from <address> - Force the response to come from a specific address
  • --force-markdown - Treat inline text as Markdown, implies --no-headers
  • --blurb-include-orig - Include the body of the original message in the response body