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#1 2005-06-26 18:06:20

Marcos
Member
Registered: 2004-04-08
Posts: 70

pdf creator

Well, I have no idea about the dificulty of this, but…

What about a plugin or feature that let choose in every post the possibility of to create a pdf file of that post? Then, in the body of post users could see a link to that pdf file.

Good day.

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#2 2005-06-26 19:35:05

paularms
Member
From: University of Minnesota
Registered: 2004-10-21
Posts: 155
Website

Re: pdf creator

Oh wow… you have got to be kidding.

Try searching google to even see if this is possible… I really really doubt it.

EDIT: after searching… I found this … but not every host will have this…

Last edited by paularms (2005-06-26 19:37:21)

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#3 2005-06-26 19:54:29

KurtRaschke
Plugin Author
Registered: 2004-05-16
Posts: 275

Re: pdf creator

Sure. There are PDF libraries for PHP; it could be done. But what exactly are you looking for in the PDF? Are you looking for the page to be rendered as it would be in a browser? I’m not sure that there’s a very good way to do that automatically. On the other hand, if you wanted a different layout for the PDF—a simple header, the post title, then the post content, that probably wouldn’t be that hard.

Also, I’d suggest that the generated PDFs should be cached, similar to the way the zem_ir plugin works, so that the PDF doesn’t have to be regenerated each time there’s a download.

http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/
http://www.fpdf.org/

-Kurt


kurt@kurtraschke.com

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#4 2005-06-26 20:48:44

Jeremie
Member
From: Provence, France
Registered: 2004-08-11
Posts: 1,578
Website

Re: pdf creator

It is possible as a plugin, it shouldn’t be too hard even. It “simply” has to be done :)

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#5 2005-06-26 23:17:34

ubernostrum
Member
From: Lawrence, KS
Registered: 2004-05-05
Posts: 238
Website

Re: pdf creator

> paularms wrote:
> Try searching google to even see if this is possible… I really really doubt it.

Jeremey Keith has been doing this with his homebrew weblogging system for close to two years now, using nothing more than the standard PDFlib functions that are available from PHP. So for a sufficiently motivated plugin writer I don’t think it’d be all that hard.

Last edited by ubernostrum (2005-06-26 23:17:43)


You cooin’ with my bird?

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#6 2005-06-26 23:38:55

sekhu
Member
Registered: 2005-05-12
Posts: 428
Website

Re: pdf creator

WordPress can do this via a plugin, and tha’ts just one of many that can do it – there are several other platform that can achieve this. It would be nice, but I;m not sure about how critical it is as a feature.

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#7 2005-06-26 23:51:35

paularms
Member
From: University of Minnesota
Registered: 2004-10-21
Posts: 155
Website

Re: pdf creator

I don’t really understand how this would really be useful.

Can someone explain any situation where the user would rather download a PDF of the page instead of either copying the contents or printing the page?

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#8 2005-06-27 01:29:31

ubernostrum
Member
From: Lawrence, KS
Registered: 2004-05-05
Posts: 238
Website

Re: pdf creator

> paularms wrote:
> I don’t really understand how this would really be useful.
> Can someone explain any situation where the user would rather download a PDF of the page
> instead of either copying the contents or printing the page?

PDF is a handy format for printing, and much more reliable than print-media stylesheets. It’s also handy for redistribution of content. It’s easier to create PDF from source formats like LaTeX or DocBook, but I can see how it’d be a handy feature to do from HTML.


You cooin’ with my bird?

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#9 2005-06-27 01:48:24

paularms
Member
From: University of Minnesota
Registered: 2004-10-21
Posts: 155
Website

Re: pdf creator

ugh… print media stylesheets are so horribly supported… I tried them a couple times but it never worked out quite the way it was supposed to. I’ve had better luck with just printing out pages. I still think that it’s a very rare thing to need to be able to create a PDF of all of your pages on-the-fly.

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#10 2005-06-27 02:33:07

blumie607
Member
Registered: 2004-03-08
Posts: 175
Website

Re: pdf creator

It would be cool. I saw it on some other site (forgot the site, though). Also, it could be useful for writing long “documents”, but I guess you could always just make a PDF on the computer and then include a link to download it.


bludrop studios .::. Creative Expression

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#11 2005-11-02 23:55:30

simonaut
Member
Registered: 2005-06-28
Posts: 16
Website

Re: pdf creator

I am working on a PDF creator for the articles on my site to be exported to a PDF to download dynamicly. I have it mostly done on my local server gonna work on some kinks and then upload and publish on my site www.simonaut.com


Chat with me here!
AIM: s1monaut
http://www.simonaut.com/

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#12 2005-11-08 15:56:38

hablablow
Member
From: Paris
Registered: 2004-12-13
Posts: 309
Website

Re: pdf creator

Just walking around searching exactly for this feature… So I can only add my voice to this request… Pdf has the advantages of being print-friendly and easily re-usable by a third person on another computer… Instead of having to cut n’ paste pieces of text and saving images directly from a web page… The simplest way I see it: could be achieved in the writte tab > Export as Pdf ( including images )…The layout of this Pdf is not so important in my opinion as long as another person gets texts and images… No idea how to do this for a digest of multiple articles…
Anyway, strong support here…

Last edited by hablablow (2005-11-08 15:59:45)


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