By dharma-1 on

Hi all,
I'm looking forward to test the new upcoming 4.7 release, because my customer needs a solution to write a user manual with a complete export to pdf. I guess I could maybe export docbook format to pdf, but I tried with the following pattern docbook->fo->pdf, but the result was I saw the html tag in the pdf, like

jhkjhkj

, and so on ... :((
So I wonder if a full pdf export would be included in the new 4.7 release ? And if not, is there any alternatives to export my drupal book to pdf ?
Thank you for your support.
R.

Comments

maca’s picture

maca commented

Hi,
in Drupal ver. 4.5 I was using PDFView module with own (Czech) fonts for generate PDF on the fly. Now with 4.6 series I export documentation only "off-line" by LaTeX (printer-friendly version -> save to disk -> transform html tags to LaTeX [own Perl script] -> pdflatex).

dharma-1’s picture

dharma-1 commented

I tried pdfView but I am unable to generate the entire book, only page by page :(( Was it your constraint for not continuing with pdfView ?
Unfortunately I dont know Latex,is it easy enough to go with it ? Or is there another possibility ? I think understanding your best way (maybe the only one?) to get pdf is to transform directly html but does your solution support pictures inside books ?
Thank you for your support.
R.

maca’s picture

maca commented

My first site with PDF export was realized in Cocoon project (apache.org) with FO transformation on the fly - I think best solution for PDF exports. We had own on-line pages editor based on simply DocBook. Customers (without html knowledge) could edit own www pages through HTML forms and on each page there was a link for PDF download (Cocoon -> FOP).
Now I am using Drupal because PDF export is not primary target for my site. TeX (LaTeX) is easy. I had no experience with it too, do not worry. Yes you can insert images (not so easy, but possible). If I find your e-mail address I send you my short script for taste if you want. :-)

puregin’s picture

puregin commented

Hi,

The current 'Export to DocBook' for Drupal 4.6 just wraps
HTML in a
tag, which probably isn't that useful.

I have a module which applies XSLT to HTML to generate
DocBook from Drupal Books. It works reasonably well, but could use some tweaking. In particular, you'll need to spend some time editing the DocBook to get what you want.

My module uses PHP5; I gave up on the hacked implementation of XSLT in PHP4.

Give me a day or two to put this in the contributed modules.

--
puregin

puregin’s picture

puregin commented

I've checked in the Export DocBook module as a contributed module. This is pretty experimental, so please feel free to ask if you need support.

Once you have DocBook, you can use any of the (free or commercial) DocBook toolsets to generate PDF. I've used XSLT with xslt stylesheets from DocBook.org, and Apache FOP.

Good luck - again, please contact me if you have questions, suggestions for improvement (much remains to be done!) or if you'd like to work with me on this!

Djun

--
puregin