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

[Dries Buytaert]

On 20 Apr 2005, at 23:03, Moshe Weitzman wrote:

> bryan on the web wrote:
>> It seems to me that is might make more sense in the long run to build 
>> Server-Side PDF generation into the book module using PHP.  There is 
>> a costly PDF library for PHP called PDFlib
>
> 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.
>
> Charlie contributed a process which takes a bit of work, and produces 
> decent results (I suppose - I haven't actually seen the output). How 
> can we do better?

Moshe is right.  Generating a PDF is _easy_.  The challenge is making 
the book (i) useful and (ii) pretty while (iii) keeping the maintenance 
cost to a minimum.  It is not about blindly transforming txt/html to 
PDF.

(i) If we end up with a 300 page book we need things like a table of 
contents with page numbers, the ability to reference other parts of the 
book using section numbers and page numbers (not using links), an index 
that maps keywords to page numbers, etc.  I don't think this is 
possible unless we use LaTeX or DocBook.

(ii) In addition to being useful the book must be pretty. For the book 
to be pretty, it has to be (a) consistent and (b) in format that allow 
it to be pretty-fied.  We could either do this by hand or we can 
enforce this by sticking to a particular syntax (eg. LaTeX or DocBook). 
  Know that even if we spend 1 day a week tweaking the consistency of 
the handbook, it is never going to match the consistency obtained with 
LaTeX/Docbook.  (We also need a review system and someone to 
decline/approve changes.)

(iii) To reduce the overhead, it would be nice if we could 
automatically generate a new version of the book.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/