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Skoda manual offline generator

Skoda is not (no longer) providing PDF or paper versions of manuals for their cars. This can be inconvenient if you're in a location without internet, or if you just like to browse or search through a manual.

This little script crawls the Skoda manual website and extracts one section at a time, building a large HTML file in the process. Additionally, any images are downloaded as well. This is combined with a bit of minimal CSS to make the result look half-way decent (feel free to customize this).

Please do not share any extracted manuals further than your own use, there's probably copyright on them.

Prerequisites

You will need the following unix command-line tools:

  • bash
  • curl
  • sed
  • xmllint
  • jq

And optionally Calibre, to conveniently convert the HTML to something else.

Extraction process

Since the manual website requires certain cookies to deliver content, the process is a little convoluted:

  • Go to https://manual.skoda-auto.com/ and select a manual. Click on Show, and the target manual, so you end up on a URL resembling https://digital-manual.skoda-auto.com/w/en_GB/show/SOME-ID-HERE?ct=SOME-ID-HERE
  • Note the manual ID (marked SOME-ID-HERE above)
  • We're now going to take the cookies from that site. Open up your Firefox Developer Console (or equivalent on other browsers) with F12.
  • Go to the "Network" tab
  • Reload the page
  • Scroll up to the very first request, right-click it, and select "Copy Value" -> "Copy as cURL"
  • Paste the result into any text editor. It should look like:
curl 'https://digital-manual.skoda-auto.com/w/en_GB/show/599333bff3ba55cbac144525291a2266_1_en_GB?ct=599333bff3ba55cbac144525291a2266_1_en_GB'
  --compressed -H 'User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:120.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/120.0'
  -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8' -H 'Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5'
  -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br' -H 'Connection: keep-alive' -H 'Cookie: LOTS-OF-DATA-HERE' -H 'Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1'
  -H 'Sec-Fetch-Dest: document' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate' -H 'Sec-Fetch-Site: same-site'
  • Copy the content of the Cookie: header (marked LOTS-OF-DATA-HERE above) to the clipboard.
  • Start a bash shell in this repository, and write (replacing where appropriate):
export COOKIES='PASTE-YOUR-COOKIES-HERE'
./skoda.sh PASTE-YOUR-MANUAL-ID-HERE >manual.html
  • This should create a manual.html file with your result, writing some progress info to stderr. Images are saved in the images/ directory that's automatically created.
  • If desired, you can convert the result to PDF or EPUB using Calibre's tools:
ebook-convert manual.html manual.epub

or

ebook-convert manual.html manual.pdf