[Mediawiki-l] Printing/typesetting/converting mediawiki documents

[MHart]

I wrote some stuff to output MediaWiki as PDF here: 
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=PDF_Export

Basically, I copy index.php to PrintArticle.php with some modifications that 
parses the article for {Title} or {Title1 | Title2} where {Title} is the 
article(s) to export to PDF, and two titles separated by a | indicates no 
page breaking in the exported PDF.

Images are preserved as well as practically all formatting. I use htmldoc 
from www.htmldoc.com

So you would create a page titled:  PDF Article For Whatever

{Whatever Article 1}
{Whatever Article 2}
{Short Article 3 | Short 4 | Short 5}
{Whatever 6}

Then an href link to the PrintArticle page:

[http://yoursite.com/PrintArticle.php/PDF_Article_For_Whatever Create PDF 
for this article]

Then clicking on the "Create PDF for this article" generates something 
like...

Creating: (Whatever Article 1)
etc...

PDF_Article_For_Whatever.pdf

The HTML for those articles is generated by MediaWiki and saved by the 
PrintArticle page mods to your server temp folder. I then exec() htmldoc to 
generate the PDF, saved in a /printouts folder that you must create w/same 
privileges as /images (basically Apache needs to be able to create the file 
in that folder).

You can get to it that posting when the meta site is back up.

- MHart
- http://taxalmanac.org


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tarjei Knapstad" <tarjei.knapstad at gmail.com>
To: "Mediawiki" <mediawiki-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 11:57 AM
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Printing/typesetting/converting mediawiki documents


Hi,

We've recently started using Mediawiki quite extensively around the
office as part of the intranet, and it's working out great. Thanks for
a great piece of software!

We have one minor gripe though, which I'm trying to find a solution
to: Are there any extensions or tools to print one or more wiki pages
to postscript or PDF in a nice way?

Printing from Mozilla is quite decent, but you often end up with funny
page breaks, there's some headers/footers I can live without etc. etc.
Some solutions that've popped into my mind:

* is it possible to create an extension for this?
* is it possible to modify the css or whatever it is that decides how
the browser prints?
* are there any third party tools that could PDF-ify a Mediawiki DB?
* ... other ideas?

Any tips and pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
--
Tarjei Knapstad
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