[geeklog-devel] PDF from article

[Dan Stoner]

I think I remember the little "pdf" icon that used to appear next to the
printer icon.

So these sound like two features and both would be nice:

1.  nicer print view

2.  article to PDF


- Dan Stoner



On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:04 AM, Dirk Haun <dirk at haun-online.de> wrote:

> So I need to create PDFs from some of my articles. Only new ones,
> actually, so I don't mind a little extra manual work. I thought I'd simply
> use the "print to PDF" option from my operating system (Mac OS X, but
> Windows or Linux have similar options, AFAIK). The results weren't what I
> was hoping for, though.
>
> Just printing the "normal" article view will include the site's header and
> footer, as well as all the stuff displayed in the side blocks (e.g. Who's
> online) that you don't really need here.
>
> The dedicated "print" view that we have, however, doesn't load the
> stylesheet. So the article's formatting is lost, images don't show up as
> expected and so on.
>
> I wonder if our print view really makes sense like that. Shouldn't we at
> least load the stylesheet to preserve the formatting?
>
>
> After hacking that in, I encountered another problem: Links in the article
> are shown underlined but the actual URL they link to is lost. While you can
> make URLs in PDFs work like in HTML that would require creating the entire
> PDF from within Geeklog with the help of a PDF library (PDFlib or the like)
> and I didn't really want to invest that much time.
>
> So I extracted the URLs from the article text and added them as footnotes
> at the end of the article. I also removed the underlines and instead
> inserted the footnote number in the text.
>
> The result isn't perfect - it doesn't handle page breaks, for example. But
> I'm quite please with the way it looks. It's a clean look (without the
> site's header/footer or side blocks) but properly formatted. And you still
> get the URLs of the linked sites (the Mac OS X Preview app actually lets
> you click on those, at least the ones that don't wrap).
>
> The code I came up with for this is not very elegant, though, to put it
> mildly. It also includes some code to handle special cases on my site.
> Still, I was wondering if I should try and integrate some of this back into
> Geeklog and in which way. Right now, I gave it a separate link, /pdf
> instead of /print. But, as stated above, maybe it would make more sense to
> modify the existing print view and make it more usable.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Dirk
>
> P.S. Some of you may remember that Geeklog did have an option to generate
> PDFs at one point. But it didn't really work all that well and was
> eventually removed again.
> https://www.geeklog.net/article.php/20040607171321591
>
>
> --
> https://www.themobilepresenter.com/
>
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