Using Plucker with the Mac OS X command line

Plucker is a system that downloads webpages (and can crawl links similarly to wget) and converts them into a compressed file that can be read on a Palm handheld. The Plucker reader on the Palm can display images from the downloaded pages as well as let you tap on hyperlinks. The system is similar to iSilo, but is free and open-source. The parsing and conversion scripts, that run on your Macintosh, Windows, or Unix computer, come in several flavors, including versions in Python.

The "Plucker Desktop" download for OS X appears to provide just a GUI program and the Palm reader. These work fine, but there is considerable utility in invoking the parsing scripts directly. Fortunately, they are right there in the application package. Unfortunately, the documentation is inaccurate and the source code hard to follow. Here I explain how to use the Plucker spider from the command line and give some simple examples of what you can do with it.

Make sure to look at the sections on the configuration file and on image handling, the former in particular, as they contain some essential installation instructions.