Using Plucker with the Mac OS X command line

Invocation

If you have installed Plucker in the normal Applications directory, you can get at the spider script here:

/Applications/Plucker.app/Contents/Resources/parser/python/PyPlucker/Spider.py

Spider.py is the main script: the one that you invoke to start the download and conversion of the webpage that you eventually want to see on your Palm. It might worth your while to make an alias to this path so you never need to type or remember it.

Spider takes a big handful of options, some of which are documented in the Plucker file that is included with the download; for the rest you'll have to look at the source. They mostly have reasonable defaults and can be specified in an initialization file rather than on the command line.

The main option is -H, which tells Plucker where to begin spidering: what page to start on.

Another one you probably want is --bpp=x, which tells Plucker what bit depth to convert images to: use 0 for no images or 16 if you have a nice color Palm like a Tungsten.

The -f option tells the program where to put the converted file: supply the complete path to your hotsync install directory, which depends on your hotsync username. My username is phillips, so I do -f ~/Documents/Palm/Users/phillips/Files\ to\ Install.

Another important option, -M, tells the spider how deep to go when following links; this is like -l in wget. -M1 just gets the one page specified in -H; -M2 gets that page and all the pages linked from it. You should hesitate before specifying a link depth larger than 2, because the number of pages downloaded will grow dramatically. (There are other options, such as --stayonhost, that can limit the number of links traversed, but I am not interested in fully documenting the use of the program here.) The final result will be a single document on the Palm that will contain all the pages and images, linked together hypertextually as in the originals.

Here is an example that will get you the starting page of the document you are reading now and all the pages it links to (which should get you the whole little essay):

pluck -H http://www.lee-phillips.org/osx/plucker -M2 --bpp16 -f "$palminstall"/plucker-on-osx

This assumes that you have put

alias pluck='/Applications/Plucker.app/Contents/Resources/parser/python/PyPlucker/Spider.py'

in your .bashrc file, if you use bash, and that you have also defined the variable "$palminstall" to be the path to your hotsync install directory. The quotes around that variable are to deal with the spaces in that path.

Note that Plucker uses some external libraries to convert images to Palm format.