PH News PDF Generator

How to Use

1. Install the requirements first by entering in the terminal:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Run the app through this command:

   python app.py

Video Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0ti3OmsPOE

Description:

The PH News PDF Generator aims to simulate somehow the delivery of latest news article from ABS CBN straight to the reader straight from a PDF (a news PDF, if you will). You open the app, and then asks you to select a news report category. Once inputted, voila! A PDF containing the latest news is instantly generated for your reading consumption.

Behind the scene, this Python-based app has two (2) main components to deliver the news:

1.) Web scraping

Enabling Library: Beautiful Soup (bs4)

This library enables the app to do the web scraping functions:

• Extract all the links of news articles related to the selected news category;
• Extract the contents of a news article and store it into string for loading to PDF;

Supporting Libraries Used:

• request - Access to the website for web scraping is made possible through the use of modififed `header;
• re (regex) - While content is extracted largely by bs4, the re.match function allows cleaning of the content before its finalization;

2.) PDF Generation

Enabling Library: Report Lab

This library gets the title and finalized content, and puts them into PDF in an orderly fashion. Other functions used to achieve the desired PDF product includes:

• Use of frame and Paragraph to load and format the news contents therein for proper wrapping and presentation. This function also handles generation of multi-page PDF for voluminous contents.
• Use of imagereader to load and properly the logo image in the PDF.
• Use of drawString to place the title, date and disclaimer footers to appropriate location.
• Use of TTfont to load true fonts for styling contents
• save generates the PDF!

Supporting Libraries Used:

• datetime - converts date from the link into a string format that is used to load and print to the title;
• titlecase - formats title for styling purposes

Disclaimer: All news articles generated by this app are owned and published by ABS CBN Corporation, a media and entertainment organization in the Philippines (PH). All rights and credits go directly to ABS CBN. No copyright infringement intended.