Personal Newspaper
Create a newspaper around the people, sources, and interests you choose. The skill combines planning pages, family updates, selected reading, illustrations, and playable puzzles in a PDF that the agent checks before handing it over. It works for a solo reader, an adults-only household, or a family with children.
What it includes
- Today, tomorrow, seven-day, and 30-day planning pages.
- Shared family pages, individual child pages, an adult personal desk, and discussion pages, with optional grades, current-term assignments, and tasks.
- Reading desks for selected publications, newsletters, public feeds, and organization notices, with source attribution and explicit coverage gaps.
- Optional illustrations, three-panel comics, and numbered drawing lessons.
- A crossword, Jumble, Sudoku, and chess mate-in-one, with checked solutions and separate answer keys.
- PDF rendering, page previews, review receipts, revision history, and delivery records.
Choose only the sections you need. The newspaper name, people, sources, interests, artwork, paper size, and delivery preferences are configurable.
Start a newspaper
Add the complete skill bundle to an agent with a Python runtime and file access. Then ask:
Use Personal Newspaper to set up a newspaper for my household and prepare a checked PDF.
The agent asks about your audience, location and time zone, sections, sources, artwork, games, and delivery preferences. It presents a plan for confirmation before configuring your private workspace. You can start with a local PDF and add other capabilities later.
Private mail, calendars, task lists, and school information require your own authorized connectors or supported browser access. Public adapters support configured JSON Feed, RSS, Atom, and National Weather Service sources. The agent reports partial or unavailable coverage when a source cannot be read.
Runtime requirements
Codex
Extract the complete bundle into
<project>/.agents/skills/personal-newspaper/ for one repository, or
~/.agents/skills/personal-newspaper/ for your user account. Keep SKILL.md,
agents/, scripts/, references/, and assets/ together. Then invoke
$personal-newspaper in Codex. See the
official skill documentation
for discovery and installation details.
Codex can use its bundled Python runtime when available, with the required
packages installed in a separate environment. The runtime note in
references/codex.md covers native libraries and optional tools. A Codex
session with Python and PDF dependencies can produce a local newspaper;
account access, artwork, email, scheduling, and printing depend on the tools
available in that session.
Python and optional tools
The PDF tools require Python 3.12 or later, the packages in
scripts/requirements.txt, WeasyPrint’s platform libraries, and Poppler’s
pdftoppm command for page previews. Install them in the receiving agent’s
environment. The bundle includes its fonts and their license files.
From the installed skill folder, inspect the available commands with:
python scripts/newspaper.py --help
python scripts/newspaper.py setup-questionsImage generation, account access, email, and scheduling use the host agent’s tools. Their availability determines which options can run in that environment. Local printing uses CUPS; other printer systems need an adapter that preserves the same review, physical-test, deadline, and duplicate-print checks. Scheduling begins after a checked interactive sample and uses the host’s scheduler under your scheduling request.
Try the fictional sample
The full offline sample demonstrates an 18-page newspaper with planning, family and reading desks, two comics, a drawing lesson, and all four games. It uses fictional people and records, with optional artwork on selected pages. After installing the runtime requirements, run:
python scripts/newspaper.py validate --profile assets/full.profile.json --snapshot assets/full.snapshot.json --edition assets/full.edition.json
python scripts/newspaper.py render --profile assets/full.profile.json --snapshot assets/full.snapshot.json --edition assets/full.edition.json --output ./personal-newspaper-demo-r001Use a new output directory for each render, and inspect every generated page
preview. The smaller demo.*.json fixtures provide a three-page example.
Run the bundled tests with:
python -m unittest discover -s scripts -p 'test_*.py'Privacy and delivery
Keep personal profiles, source snapshots, portraits, and finished editions in your private workspace outside the shareable skill. The examples do not provide account access, real likenesses, delivery permission, or a schedule.
A local PDF can be the complete deliverable. Email requires your configured recipients and authorization; delivery is recorded only after the sent message and attached PDF bytes have been checked. Printing starts disabled and requires a physically confirmed printer test. A print queue accepting a job does not establish that paper was produced.
