RedShelf Downloader

Downloads the content of each page of the textbook and converts it to a PDF file.

Each page is stored in an independent folder so if you want to compile the textbook in a different way, you can.

Dependencies

requests
pdfkit
pymupdf
wkhtmltopdf (not from pip)

pip install requests pdfkit pymupdf

Install wkhtmltopdf using your package manager or from their website. Make sure that it is added to your PATH environment variable as well.

Configure

NUM_THREADS = 8
PAGE_PATH = "pages"
COOKIES = {
    "AMP_d698e26b82": "==",
    "AMP_MKTG_d698e26b82": "=",
    "csrftoken": "",
    "session_id": ""
}
NUM_PAGES = 0
BOOK_URL = "https://platform.virdocs.com/spine/XXXXXXX/{}"

To get the values for COOKIES, NUM_PAGES, and BOOK_URL, open the textbook in the browser.

COOKIES

Enter the browser's devtools and inspect a network request for the page (in the file column, it should be a single number). Click on the request and copy and paste the cookies into the file.

NUM_PAGES / BOOK_URL

Go all the way to the end of the textbook and look at the url.

The url should be formatted like so: https://platform.virdocs.com/read/book_id/page_number

In BOOK_URL replace the X's with the book ID. Update NUM_PAGES with the page number in the URL, not in the UI of the website.

NUM_THREADS

The number of threads to use to download the book. The higher the number, the faster the book will download. Make sure that the number specificed can evenly divided NUM_PAGES. For example, if you have 10 pages, NUM_THREADS can be 1, 2, 5, or 10. It cannot be 4 because 10/4 is not a whole number.