[drupal-docs] generating Drupal Handbook pdf's manually

[Djun Kim]

Quoting Charlie Lowe <cel4145 at cyberdash.com>:

> Djun Kim wrote:
>>
>>
>>    Hi Charlie - sorry, my mistake.  The URL should have been:
>>
>> http://www.puregin.org/files/Drupal_handbook.pdf
>>
>> (no 's' in handbook).
>>
>>    Yes, it's based on the printer-friendly version page.
>
> That's awesome and definitely much easier than OO if it's automatic! 
> How much of the CSS will it pick up from the original HTML version? 
> In other words, could we do some sophisticated styling with a 
> "pdf-friendly" version to produce something even sharper. I'm 
> thinking of Moshe's recent comment,
>
> "IMO, the fundamental issues here are not about generating the .pdf. 
> They are around empowering a group of authors to contribute content 
> which is later transformed into a *pretty* book. Pretty implies 
> consistency, graphics, sidebars, footnotes, etc."
>
    Unfortunately, the CSS is essentially ignored.   All conversion at this
point is done by html2ps, which attempts to glean structure from the HTML, and
applies styling through its own configuration files, which are a kind of
stripped-down CSS.

   The easiest way to improve both the presentation and the content would be to
make the input HTML more consistent.   With reference to Moshe's comment, I
think that the key to making this work is to support the authors, making it
easy for them to write content that will easily transform in the 'later
transformation' to print presentation.

   In terms of finally taking this to print, a direct transformation to 
PDF will
not give good results.  I believe that in order to get a document that really
looks good in print, we'll need to transform the content into a format 
which is
intended to support print production - and then massage heavily.

   I think that if the source content is well-designed and structured, this
won't be too difficult to do.   What we want at this point is to make 
sure that
the content is marked up cleanly, with an emphasis on structure.

   Djun

-- 
puregin at puregin.org
http://www.puregin.org