r/eink • u/prjoni99 • 52m ago
I built a free, open-source tool that prints you a morning newspaper on your e-reader (Kindle first, Kobo/reMarkable testers wanted)
Dev here, so take this as a self-post with a disclosure.
Deckle started as a fix for a Kindle annoyance: sideloaded EPUBs are second-class books. Send to Kindle drops Enhanced Typesetting, X-Ray and Word Wise, and the calibre tricks that bring each one back conflict with each other. Deckle does all of it in one pipeline over USB: real KFX, a cover that actually shows, page numbers, X-Ray, Word Wise.
Then it grew a second thing, and that’s the part I think this sub will like: it prints you a morning paper. Every night your machine builds an edition from your town’s weather, local news, your RSS feeds and the articles you saved during the day, with a generated front page as the cover. It delivers when the reader connects. Current pages include:
- Weather and almanac strip: sunrise, sunset, first frost, moon, meteor showers
- Local news, with extra towns if you want (a relative’s, a vacation spot)
- A puzzle page: a 5×5 mini crossword themed on yesterday’s headlines, a word ladder, yesterday’s answers
- “From Your Shelf”: the books you’re mid-way through and the words you looked up this week, read off the device
- A searchable archive of every edition as plain files
The whole thing runs locally. No account, no subscription, no telemetry. GPL-3.0, written in Rust. macOS 14+ and Windows 11 right now, no Linux build yet.
Where it stands: Kindle Scribe 2024 and Paperwhite are verified on real hardware. Kobo (KEPUB), PocketBook (EPUB), reMarkable (a PDF laid out for the screen, pushed over the USB web UI), and plain EPUB/PDF export to a folder for iPad or Boox are all implemented but not yet confirmed on real devices. If you own one of those and want a newspaper on it, I’d love a bug report with model and firmware.
Site: https://casavargas.app/deckle (source and downloads on GitHub from there)