issuu.com Downloader

Downloads publications from issuu.com when the download option has been disabled for the hosted document. The resulting PDF could be OCR'ed in another step using pdfocr or similar.

In practice the script does not actually download the PDF, but rather downloads the images of the pages of the flash object, and then combines those into a PDF.

Details of construction

Docker

This project can be run within Docker.

# Build the image
docker build -t issuu-downloader .

# Run the image
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app issuu-downloader document_id "magazine_name"

Downloading Multiple Documents

Using the above Docker command to run the image, you can script downloading multiple documents.

Let's say you have a comma-delimited file called files.txt with the magazine name and document ID on each line. Here's an example.

Dis-Orientation Guide 1996-1997,140529092453-b45ba390815f0b4848c24f7b0b219164
Agitation Education,130904154632-77ac842ae19549c4f1aa5f3b568f274b
Bartlett Book 2015,151209133912-2f43550b00644da53ed0bf78addcd4a5
Of Discourse and Disorientation (10.1.2014),181030203524-2a106e2dd6ee0d3c0fa4d68521d7fccd
Disorientation 2012,120905184953-631bb6c4498d42c58ce3e78cbb5d3532
Disorientation 2011,110907083445-fa09caa3ed9c437789fe649a3b9f49bf
Student Disorientation Handbook,131212213243-2cc89a2c04a67efd7080778a961e7dce
2012 Disorientation Guide,121205112123-49ecec06d96f4fd890365e6950527125
Tufts Disorientation Guide 2017,170829225309-1600973e4e85b3893a12789b07dec304
UChicago DisOrientation Book 2016,160926051445-284aca72436113030cfc7c58a8c9f6b8
UChicago DisOrientation 2010,160822233246-d5144a88673450fa1678755828a08bb9
UChicago DisOrientation 2013,160822233501-96b17f9be09b5c3378d55302a28f69ff
UChicago DisOrientation 2011,160905213842-47c3eab70188fb628362598613177b0e
DisOrientation Book 2019,191217044004-692d12b23b83eead3380d40c026d4b1d
DisOrientation Book 2018,180924013743-85dec77e41b59030ad75c4bc2e2bd80f
UVA Disorientation Guide: The Pursuit Of Truth Begins Here,170902175606-4ef72f0c4e5bfca8159104b39b3b8202
Vassar Disorientation Guide 2019-2020,190831040154-93c7e9362ee0f128f8c6e5b9edc2838c

You can invoke the following code in a bash shell to download each of these documents.

while IFS=, read magazine_name document_id; do
    docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app issuu-downloader $document_id "$magazine_name"
done < files.txt

Dependencies

Use Bundler to install project dependencies on your local system.

bundle install