Easily download the PDF version of your purchased reader from Leiden Online Reader. I believe we should have access to our readers locally, digitally, but also offline without relying on the paper version.
The online reader is very restrictive in what you can do:
No. You can only download the readers you own with this.
Here is what the code does:
Disclaimer: This extension is not affiliated with Leiden University and it may stop working at any time when they decide to change the way readers work. Ideally you should bother your course coordinators so they can bother the appropriate people to spend some resources to improve the situation. ONLY use this for creating a personal backup of your reader.
All of this happens locally on your computer and there is no middle man that comes in between, so it is also safe.
Install the dependencies:
pnpm install
Start development server (starts a clean Chrome instance for dev):
pnpm dev
Or build it yourself, for firefox:
pnpm install
pnpm build-firefox
Or chrome:
pnpm install
pnpm build-chrome
Tech used to build this extension:
The PDF files on the server are served to the client encoded as base64. They have some sort of customised PDF handling library that decodes it and then gets rendered with a variant of pdfjs that has most of its features stripped out and disabled for the user. It’s almost like they hate their users. Instead you have to deal with anno 2015 bootstrap with a really bad implementation of responsiveness and a proprietary (read: unexportable) note taking area.
They should strip out most of the features from the digital library and just have a good PDF reader for this.