Across the first three issues, 145 of 208 referenced images reached the
page; 38 that had been downloaded, re-encoded and written into the EPUB
were never referenced by any chapter, and 69 became `[image: …]` lines.
Six independent causes, each verified against the real articles:
- **Entity-encoded URLs never matched their asset.** `prepare_body`
re-runs `ammonia::clean`, which writes `&` as `&`, and the tag
scanner that looks the asset up compared raw attribute text against a
URL a real parser had decoded. Every image with a query string lost.
`parse_attrs` now decodes entities.
- **Readability clobbers a working `src`.** Its lazy-image heuristic
copies any attribute containing `.jpg` over `src`, which on NPR meant
a `{width}` template (the CDN answers those with a grey square reading
"Image"), on Substack a JSON blob, on dfarq an entire `srcset` string.
Pages are now normalized before readability sees them: every `<img>`
is reduced to `src`/`alt`/`title` with the best candidate from the
lazy attributes, `src`, `srcset` and `<picture><source>`, so there is
nothing left for the heuristic to substitute. Candidates that cannot
resolve — braces, whitespace, quotes, `data:` — are rejected by shape
rather than by publisher.
- **Readability deletes `<button>` and its subtree**, taking lightbox
images with it and leaving the captions behind. Image-only wrappers
are unwrapped first.
- **SVG was undecodable**, so vector charts became placeholders. They
are rasterized with resvg, which the cover already depends on.
- **Relative URLs resolved against the pre-redirect URL**, 404ing every
image on an article reached through a shortener. `fetch_readable` now
reports where it landed.
- **The 12-image cap** silently truncated photo essays, and the images
past it were advertised as failures. Removed; the issue-wide byte
budget is the real backstop.
An image that still cannot be embedded is now dropped rather than
announced, unless its alt text is a real description — decorative rules,
spacers and dead links were generating most of the placeholder noise.
`examples/image_audit.rs` replays the pipeline over the articles of
published issues and reports what reaches the page. On issues 1–3:
208→214 images referenced, 145→214 shown, 69→0 placeholders, 38→0
orphaned assets. The three images still not embedded are a 14×14 favicon
and a 650×2 divider — correctly declined, and no longer announced.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- World Briefing now starts with yesterday, preserves complete nested
event hierarchies and Wikipedia links, fetches deduplicated article
leads concurrently, and adds stable-ID summaries plus a daily overview.
- Enrichment runs after normal editorial work and degrades safely with
report warnings.
- Colophon facts now use X4-safe block paragraphs.
- Standard cover remains 1200×1600 RGB PNG.
- X4 cover is a 480×800 baseline RGB JPEG with consistent XHTML and OPF
declarations.
- Added CrossInk cache-clearing guidance to README.md.
- Worked around an epub-builder duplicate XML-ID defect discovered by
validation.
It turns out it is currently impossible for the Xteink X4 to download
XTC files from an OPDS server. So I switched the built-in OPDS server in
this binary (daily.hallada.net/opds) to serve the EPUB files instead of
the XTC files. The X4 is pretty capable of reading the X4 edition of the
EPUB that was optimized for it anyways, and I prefer the flexibility of
EPUB, so I might end up eventually deleting the XTC conversion. For now,
I kept the conversion step (in case I ever want to ever try manually
copying them to the device) and I keep a limited number of XTC issues on
the server since they are quite big in filesize. The BookOrbit
integration is now optional since the built-in OPDS server is able to
serve the EPUBs. In my installation, I serve the EPUBs through both. The
daily.hallada.net/opds server is just a little quicker to navigate and
download the EPUBs on the X4 since the BookOrbit OPDS requires diving
into a couple layers of folders before you get to the files.
Full implementation of a personalized daily newspaper delivered as an
EPUB.
Articles are pulled from a local self-hosted Miniflux instance, enriched
with comments, summarized and filtered by DeepSeek AI, and then
assembled into two EPUB editions: standard and optimized for the Xteink
X4 e-ink reader. Both are served by the local self-hosted BookOrbit OPDS
server in a separate library. Then the X4 edition is futher converted to
XTC format and served over a separate OPDS server hosted by the Rust
binary. Runs are tracked in a local SQLite database so runs are
idempotent per date.
Full documentation of the plan is in docs/plans and setup and install
instructions are in the README.md file.
thalladaandClaude Opus 5