A command-line tool to download and convert books from the Ellen G. White Estate website into high-quality PDFs. For books that don't have official PDF downloads available, this script assembles them from the web content while preserving proper formatting and adding metadata.
- Downloads and converts books that don't have official PDF versions
- Downloads official PDFs when available
- Adds book cover images (generates placeholder covers if none available)
- Includes proper page breaks and table of contents
- Adds comprehensive metadata to generated PDFs
- Handles duplicate pages automatically
- Polite to the server with built-in rate limiting
- Supports books with special characters in titles
The following dependencies must be installed:
curl- For downloading web contentexiftool- For adding PDF metadatawkhtmltopdf- For HTML to PDF conversionxidel- For HTML parsing
- Download wkhtmltopdf with patched Qt from https://wkhtmltopdf.org
- Download xidel from https://github.com/benibela/xidel
egw-downloader <book_id> [output_directory]book_id: Required. The ID number from the book's URLoutput_directory: Optional. Where to save the generated PDF (defaults to ~/Downloads/egw-downloader)
Get the Book ID from the mobile URL of the book. For example:
https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/133/info
^^^
Book ID is 133
The script generates a PDF file with:
- Book cover (or generated placeholder)
- Table of contents
- Properly formatted content
- Page numbers
- Complete metadata (title, author, description)
The output filename follows the format: <book_code> - <title>.pdf
To avoid unnecessary load on the Ellen G. White servers, many books have been pre-downloaded and archived. You can find them at: Archive.org - Ellen G. White Collection
Download a specific book to the default location:
egw-downloader 133Download to a custom directory:
egw-downloader 133 ~/Documents/egw-books