PDF downloader for Pearson's ActiveLearn textbooks

Requirements

• Python 3.6+
• ocrmypdf
• img2pdf
• pdftk
• wget
• Some form of bash
• My Python script

Instructions

(Credit to u/flanter21 for his guide on getting the required URL)

1. Log into ActiveLearn.

2. Open the book you want to convert.

3. Navigate to the last page of the book.

4. Right-click on the last page of the book.

5. Click inspect.

   <div style="position:absolute;top:0;bottom:0;left:0;right:0;background-color:rgba(0,0,0,0);"></div>

   should be what is highlighted.

6. Press the up arrow once on the keyboard to select the iframe.

7. Look for the URL in the iframe element.

8. Double-click the URL to highlight it and press Ctrl+C to copy it.

9. Paste the URL in the address bar of a new tab.

10. Right-click the image that appears and click open in new tab.

11. Copy the URL of that page.

    It should end with a hyphen and then 3 numbers and then .jpg (e.g. -408.jpg)

12. Run python3 downloader.py and fill in the prompts it gives you (for advanced users, it uses click so you can look at the help for CLI options)

13. Wait for it to complete, you should now have a book.pdf in the current directory.

Some warnings

• I cannot guarantee you won't be blocked from ActiveLearn for running this tool; however I was not
• Ensure you do not run this in a directory containing a book folder as all its contents will be deleted (if you use -o this changes to whatever you supplied)
• I cannot guarantee that the OCR will be perfect as it isn't my library