By peterx on

What is your experience of producing online documentation as Drupal web pages then publish the result in various forms including PDF? What works? What does not?

I am starting with a clean Drupal 6 installation. The users will enter content with FCKEditor. I might use BUEditor for code related documentation.

The Printer, e-mail and PDF versions module, http://drupal.org/project/print, looks like the right module to convert books to PDF for printing and distribution. The print module requires dompdf or TCPDF. Which is the best choice when you are stuck with producing PDFs for some users?

Is there anything else I should use? Where can I see it in action?

There will be a small number of users with edit rights for their own work. There will be lots of users with read rights. Some documentation will be public. Some will be restricted to users with specific roles. Eventually I would like a workflow where more than one person makes changes, one person approves changes, an editor checks the changes for grammar, a user tests the changes for readability, then the changes are published. Who has experience with Drupal 6 workflow? What is the easiest approach?

Some of the content might be shared across several books. The content would have to adopt the page and index structure of each book. Is there an easy way to share nodes and images across several books?

I know how to create modules so could work with beta modules and example code but I want to use stuff that is or will be mainstream long term so someone else can maintain the site without extensive PHP experience.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Rosamunda’s picture

Rosamunda commented

Personally (I´ve recently installed the print module to be used to export in pdf), I think TCPDF is the best chioce, just because the other project seems abandoned.
Regards,
Rosamunda

Sophia’s picture

Sophia commented

WOW! peterx, that sounds like a clone of what we set up recently. We, too, have a publishing site (newsletter) and are looking for ways to publish our newsletter straight into PDF. Let's work together on this :)

We have already licked the workflow and it works exacly the way you describe. You may want to look into the workflow module: http://drupal.org/project/workflow, and if you want more information how we set it up, I can supply some screenshots.