Articles for Instapaper

A plugin for CrossPoint Reader. It is not made or endorsed by Instapaper.

Downloads your saved Instapaper articles to the reader as EPUB books. You sync them from the reader's web page. With the optional converter, articles include their images, you can also download them on the reader itself, and the reader can send your reading progress to Instapaper and archive the articles you finish.

What you need

• CrossPoint firmware from 30 October 2026 or newer (newer than 2.0.0rc). Older firmware from 27 October on works, without your folders on the reader and without archiving from an article's last page.
• An Instapaper account.
• For the optional converter: a free Cloudflare account, and a GitHub or GitLab account to deploy it with one button (or a computer with Node.js 24 or newer).

Step 1: Get an Instapaper access token

The plugin uses Instapaper's API with your own access token. Instapaper gives one to the owner of an "application", which you create for yourself. It takes a minute and needs no approval.

1. Sign in on instapaper.com.
2. Open the Applications page and create a new application. Any name works, for example "CrossPoint". You do not need callback URIs. A new application is in Owner Only mode: it works only with your own account, which is all the plugin needs. Do not submit it for review.
3. Instapaper shows a client ID and a client secret. The plugin does not need them.
4. Open the application and select Generate access token. Copy the token right away: Instapaper shows it only once. If you lose it, generate a new one; the old one stops working.

Step 2: Install the plugin and connect

1. On the reader, turn on Settings > Connectivity > Plugins.
2. Install the plugin with Plugin Hub: on the reader, open Home > Plugins > Plugin Hub > Community Plugins, select Articles for Instapaper and install it. (Or copy the files of the instapaper.crosspoint-plugin folder to /.crosspoint/plugins/instapaper/ on the SD card.) Restart the reader.
3. On the reader, start File Transfer. Open the web address it shows in a browser on the same network, and go to Settings.
4. On the Articles for Instapaper card, paste the token and tap Connect. The card shows "Connected as" with your Instapaper username.

You can now sync text-only articles from this page (see Use on the web page).

Step 3 (optional): Set up the converter

The converter is a small Cloudflare Worker, included in this plugin's source repository, that turns an Instapaper article and its images into an EPUB. With it, articles include their images, there is no size limit, and you can download articles on the reader itself. Without it, the web page builds text-only EPUBs. The reader cannot do this alone: Instapaper only gives article text as JSON, which the reader cannot open.

The Worker runs on your own Cloudflare account. The free plan is enough.

Deploy it with the button

1. Select Deploy to Cloudflare above. Sign in to Cloudflare, or create a free account.
2. Connect your GitHub (or GitLab) account when asked. Cloudflare copies this repository into your account and deploys the converter from it.
3. Keep the suggested names and select Deploy. When it finishes, open the Worker (Workers & Pages > instapaper-epub) and copy its address, for example https://instapaper-epub.yourname.workers.dev.

Or deploy it from a computer

1. Install Node.js 24 or newer, and download or clone this repository. Open a terminal in its folder.
2. Run npm install, then npx wrangler login and sign in to Cloudflare.
3. Run npx wrangler deploy. If it asks you to choose a workers.dev subdomain, pick any name: it becomes part of the address. At the end it prints the converter's address. (With the newer Cloudflare CLI, cf auth login and cf deploy do the same.)

Connect the reader to it

1. Check the converter: open its address in a browser. It should say "Articles for Instapaper converter".
2. On the reader's web page, on the Articles for Instapaper card, find Converter (optional). Turn on Use a Cloudflare Worker converter, paste the address and tap Save converter. The card checks that the converter answers.
3. Optional: to send reading progress and archive finished articles (see Progress and archiving), also turn on Send reading progress and archive finished articles and tap Save converter. Then restart the reader once.

Cloudflare redeploys a converter deployed with the button whenever your copy of the repository changes, so to update it, pull this repository's changes into your copy and push. Otherwise run npx wrangler deploy again with the new version. To stop using it, turn the option off and tap Save converter; the address is kept for later. To remove it completely, delete the instapaper-epub Worker in the Cloudflare dashboard under Workers & Pages.

Anyone who knows the address can use the converter with their own Instapaper token, which counts against your Cloudflare free plan. Keep the address to yourself.

Use on the reader

1. Open Home > Plugins > Articles for Instapaper.
2. Pick Home, Archive, Liked or one of your own folders, which are listed fresh each time you open the plugin. The newest 100 articles of each are listed, 8 per page.
3. With the converter, select an article and press Fetch. It is saved in /Instapaper/ and appears in Browse Files and the library.

Without the converter the reader can list your articles but not download them: Fetch shows "Download failed". Use Sync now on the web page instead.

With the converter, articles include their images, whether you fetch them on the reader or sync them on the web page. The converter has Cloudflare turn each image into a grayscale JPEG of at most 800 x 800 pixels, which the reader decodes quickly and at full detail. Each article also gets a cover, made from its lead image (or its first image) and sized for the reader's cover screen and Home thumbnails: a 528 x 800 grayscale picture, cropped around the most important part. To hide images, use the reader's own image setting.

Articles use the title Instapaper lists, on the reader and from Sync now. An article without one is titled with the title of the web page.

Progress and archiving

With the converter and Send reading progress and archive finished articles on:

• When you leave an Instapaper article on the reader, its reading position is sent to Instapaper, so its other apps continue where you stopped.
• Leave an article on its last page, and it moves to your Instapaper Archive. (Articles downloaded with version 1.0.3 or older end with an End of article page; leave those on that page.)

When you put the reader to sleep in an Instapaper article, the reader turns on Wi-Fi for a few seconds and sends this before sleeping (with at least 20% battery and a saved network). Otherwise it is sent the next time the reader connects to Wi-Fi: when you open the plugin on the reader, start File Transfer, or use another Wi-Fi feature. Other books send nothing, and sleeping in them does not turn on Wi-Fi.

This works for articles downloaded after you turn it on (each needs a small .meta.json file next to it, written at download time). After turning the option on or off, restart the reader once: the reader reads this setting when it starts. With Delete articles archived or deleted in Instapaper on, the next web sync also removes them from the SD card.

Use on the web page

1. On the card, pick a folder (Home, Archive, Liked, or one of your own folders) and how many of its newest articles to download.
2. Tap Sync now. A progress bar under the button shows which article is downloading. Keep the page open until it says how many were added; any skipped articles are listed with the reason. Articles are saved in /Instapaper/, named the way the reader names them. Articles already on the card, whether synced here or fetched on the reader, are not downloaded again; skipped ones are tried again on the next sync.

Delete articles archived or deleted in Instapaper: when this is on, a sync asks Instapaper what changed since the last sync and deletes the Instapaper articles on the card that were archived or deleted, wherever you did it: in Instapaper's apps, or on the reader with the archive option. The first sync with it on looks back 30 days. Articles in the folder you sync are kept, so syncing Archive keeps your archived articles. Files that did not come from this plugin are never deleted.

Highlights

Tap Send highlights to send the passages you highlighted on the reader in Instapaper articles to Instapaper. Highlights that were sent before are not sent again. It works for articles downloaded with this version of the plugin or later (it finds them by their .meta.json file).

• Without Instapaper Premium, Instapaper accepts five highlights a month. The card says when the limit is reached; the rest are sent the next month.
• If the same passage appears more than once in an article, Instapaper marks its first occurrence.
• Notes are not sent, and highlights deleted on the reader stay in Instapaper.

An app on your network can also start a web sync: send a sync job for the instapaper plugin to /api/plugin-jobs while the reader's web page (or /plugins-run) is open.

Updating

Plugin Hub shows Update when a new version is out. Your token and settings stay. An update replaces device.json, so afterwards open the reader's web Settings page once: if progress and archiving is on, the card puts its handler back. Then restart the reader.

Limits

• Images need the converter. SVG drawings, icons smaller than 120 pixels, and images that fail to download are left out. An article keeps at most 30 images.
• Cloudflare's free plan converts 5,000 different images a month. After that, only images the reader can show as they are (JPEG, PNG, GIF under 1 MB) are kept until the next month.
• PDFs and videos saved to Instapaper have no text, so they cannot be downloaded. So are pages Instapaper cannot extract text from.
• Instapaper has no article language, so the plugin guesses it from the writing system, for hyphenation. Latin-script articles use your browser's language, or English.
• Without the converter, a web sync skips an article whose EPUB would be over 256 KB, roughly 100,000 words of English. With it, there is no size limit.
• Progress and archiving need the converter. Likes and folders are not sent back to Instapaper.
• Fetching on the reader an article that is already on the card replaces it with a fresh copy (the reader's catalog does not check).

Privacy

The access token is stored in config.json in the plugin folder on the SD card. Anyone with the card, or with access to the reader's web page while File Transfer runs, can read it. With the converter, each download sends the token to it; it passes the token to Instapaper and keeps nothing.

To stop the token from working, tap Disconnect, then revoke or regenerate it on the application's page on instapaper.com.

Development

How the plugin and the converter work, and how to release a new version: docs/DEVELOPMENT.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.