Extract PDF from IEEE Xplore embeds

So I have some issues with embedded PDFs in Firefox on Ubuntu. A cursory Google shows I’m not alone, and a few minutes of effort would probably produce a solution. Apparently however, that’s not how my brain is wired. It wouldn’t really be an issue if IEEE Xplore didn’t bury their papers behind an iframe embed. While it’s easy enough to smoke out the actual link, it’s still a PITA. As a hack n slash solution, I threw together a little Python script which, when given an ID as an argument (that’s the ‘arnumber’ argument as it appears on the IEEE landing page) will snuff out the PDF and download it to a directory baked into the script. It’s nothing interesting and could be infinitely better written, but if you’re equally irked by the embeds feel free to run with it. If you have no issues, this probably isn’t very useful for you!

Change the PDF_DUMP_DIR global to set the directory to write for. Needs to be emphasised – this was a 5 minute job – it sanitises nothing!
Download ieeexplore.py (1.3kb)