📘 HFYDL – Reddit Story Downloader [v0.1 beta]

hfydl is a smart Reddit crawler that transforms "Humanity, Fuck Yeah" (HFY) stories into beautifully structured eBooks.

✨ Features

• 🔗 Story Chain Discovery
  Using heuristic and semantic embeddings, it attempts to follow a chain of reddit posts with similar titles.

• 🎨 Export Formats Galore
  Output your HFY masterpiece in: epub, pdf, markdown, html, docx, odt, json, and more (via Pandoc).

• ✍️ Handcraft the Chapter List
  Pause and tweak the url list using your $EDITOR.

• 📄 Well Formatted Output
  All stories are saved as readable, paginated chapters, with a table of contents.

• 📚 Cover Support
  Add a cover image to EPUB exports for that final polish.

• 💋 Simple(ish)
  Only ~220 lines of python... Well as simple as you can make something like this.

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🛠️ Installation

Prerequisites

You need to have the following installed:

• python3
• pandoc
• (optional) if you want pdfs: pandoc pdf engine

Unix-Based Install

# Download Project
git clone https://github.com/lizard-demon/hfydl
cd hfydl

# Create a virtual enviroment
python3 -m venv venv

# Enter the virtual enviroment
source ./venv/bin/activate

# Install Depedancies
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Make code executable
sudo chmod +x hfydl

# Now you have a working downloader
./hfydl -h

Note:

If you ever want to use this tool again, you will need to re-enter your venv.

cd hfydl                    # go to git folder
source ./venv/bin/activate  # enter your venv
./hfydl -h                  # now you can use it
deactivate                  # exits the venv

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🚀 Usage

./hfydl [options] [REDDIT_URL]

🔍 Crawl a Reddit HFY story and export as EPUB:

./hfydl "https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/abc123/story_title"

🖋️ Interrupt and edit the url list before downloading:

./hfydl --edit "https://reddit.com/..."

🧪 Save the url list without downloading:

./hfydl "https://reddit.com/..." --crawl-only links.txt

📜 Download url list without crawling:

./hfydl --from-list links.txt --format markdown

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⚙️ Command-line Options

Option	Description
--edit [EDITOR]	Edit the list of discovered URLs before exporting.
--format FORMAT	Output format (e.g. epub, pdf, markdown, json, html, etc.).
--cover IMAGE	Optional cover image for EPUB export.
--crawl-only FILE	Only crawl and save the URL list to file (no downloading/exporting).
--from-list FILE	Only download and export from a file (no crawling).
--temperature VAL	Similarity threshold (0.0–1.0) for following links (default: 0.5).
URL	Starting Reddit post (if --from-list is not used).

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❤️ Contribute

I'm homeless. Food money is appriciated.

https://ko-fi.com/lizard_demon