People's Daily PDF

Generate a single PDF of People's Daily by fetching and stitching the official page PDFs.

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or newer

• requests, pypdf, pytest (development) — install with:

  pip install -r requirements.txt

• Optional: Ghostscript if you plan to use --compress for file-size reduction.

Usage

python peoples_daily.py [-h] [-d DATE] [-o OUTPUT] [-v] [--compress]

Flag	Description	Default
-d, --date	Issue date (YYYY-MM-DD).	today
-o, --output	Output filename.	人民日报_<date>.pdf
-v, --verbose	Print progress + warning details.	off
--compress	Run Ghostscript to shrink the merged PDF.	off

Examples

Fetch today's paper:

python peoples_daily.py

Show CLI help and available options:

python peoples_daily.py -h

Save the 2025-10-15 issue to a custom file with verbose logging:

python peoples_daily.py -d 2025-10-15 -o paper.pdf -v

Produce a compressed version (requires Ghostscript on PATH):

python peoples_daily.py -d 2025-10-15 --compress

Notes

• Compression uses Ghostscript with the /ebook profile. The script skips compression automatically if Ghostscript is not available.
• Verbose mode surfaces upstream PDF parsing warnings that are hidden by default.