Extension:PdfBook

MediaWiki extensions manual - list

PdfBook Release status: stable
Implementation	Data extraction
Description	Composes a book from articles in a category and exports as a PDF file
Author(s)	Aran Dunkley (nadTalk)
Last version	1.0.11 (2011-11-13)
Database changes	no
License	GPL v2+
Download	Download snapshot Subversion [Help] Browse source code View code changes CHANGELOG
Parameters $wgPdfBookLeftMargin, $wgPdfBookRightMargin, $wgPdfBookTopMargin, $wgPdfBookBottomMargin, $wgPdfBookFont, $wgPdfBookFontSize, $wgPdfBookLinkColour, $wgPdfBookTocLevels, $wgPdfBookExclude
Hooks used UnknownAction SkinTemplateTabs SkinTemplateNavigation
Check usage (experimental)

The PdfBook extension composes a book from articles in a category and exports as a PDF file.

Overview

Categories are a good way of organizing many articles which together comprise a kind of book. The sort-keys in the articles' categorization statements can be used to ensure that they are ordered properly. This extension allows such categories to be compiled into downloadable PDF files with a table of contents, each article forming the start of a new chapter.

Note: In version 0.0.5, a new feature has been added which allows books to be generated from non-category pages as well. If the article to be downloaded as a book is not a category, then the extension will extract the titles from article links in a bullet list. The list may be explicitly defined, or may be the result of a query. For an example of this functionality, see Creating a PDF book from a DPL query

Note: Since version 1.0.1, PdfBook can also export single articles by using format=single in the URL

Installation

Pre-requisites

• First Htmldoc needs to be installed.

  • On Debian based systems such as Ubuntu or Mepis use: apt-get install htmldoc).
  • Windows Binary can be found here. For Windows: Add Htmldoc path to PATH. (Precompiled Windows Binaries)
  • On Mac OS X: Downloading from source, using the common "./configure; make; sudo make install" procedure" works if you have those developer tools installed.

1. Download the files from SVN or download a snapshot (select your version of MediaWiki) and place the files under $IP/extensions/PdfBook
2. Add to the end of LocalSettings.php:
   require_once("$IP/extensions/PdfBook/PdfBook.php");
3. Installation can now be verified through Special:Version on your wiki

Note: I've noticed that MediaWiki 1.11+ requires more memory to create large books. If your book is around a hundred articles you'll need to give PHP 64MB.

Usage

The PDF creation is initialised by the pdfbook action, so a category can be downloaded as a PDF book directly from a link such as:

http://www.foo.bar/wiki/index.php?title=Category:foo&action=pdfbook

A more generic way of creating the link is to use the "fullurl" parser function and the FULLPAGENAMEE built in variable as in the following example.

[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}|action=pdfbook}} download this selection of articles as a PDF book]

This link can then be added to a template which can be transcluded into any category or article suitable for downloading as a book. For an example of such a template, see OrganicDesign:Category:I am that, which uses OrganicDesign:Template:Book to display the message and download link. In order to include this parser function link automatically to every category page, add it to the Mediawiki:Categoryarticlecount page.

Raw HTML output

You can download the file as a single HTML document by setting format=html in the query-string. Example:

http://www.foo.bar/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=html

Single page exports

You can export a single article as a one-page PDF by setting format=single in the query-string. Example:

http://www.foo.bar/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=single

Page Breaks

You can add page breaks into your book by adding <!-- PAGE BREAK --> into the relevant places in the content articles.

While using action=pdfbook&format=html to create an printable HTML from an category it seems not to work Use eg <h2 style="page-break-after: always;">End of the document '''{{FULLPAGENAME}}''' </h2> to create the page-break

Configuration

Here are some global variables which affect the operation of the extension. These should be set in your LocalSettings file after the include of the PdfBook.php script. These configuration options can be overridden by the parser function so that they can be set specifically for each book.

Variable	Default value	Meaning
$wgPdfBookLeftMargin	1cm	Left page margin
$wgPdfBookRightMargin	1cm	Right page margin
$wgPdfBookTopMargin	1cm	Top page margin
$wgPdfBookBottomMargin	1cm	Bottom page margin
$wgPdfBookFont	Arial	Default font to use if unspecified in content
$wgPdfBookFontSize	8	Point size of default font
$wgPdfBookLinkColour	217A28	Colour to use when rendering hyperlinks in text
$wgPdfBookTocLevels	2	Number of outline levels to use when building the table of contents
$wgPdfBookExclude	empty	List of article titles which should not be included in the book

Bugs and Todo

• Multibyte characters not working
• Tables are "hardwired" to a standard format currently
• Dynamic per-book parameters not done yet
• Interference with Extension:ASHighlight: Export halts on first encountered <source> tag. Use Extension:SyntaxHighlight GeSHi instead.
• If pdfbook is generated from an article containing article links in a bullet list, all articles in the pdf have the title of the first article in the list, not their own.
  • Solution: change the line 122 of PdfBook.php to this: "$wgOut->setHTMLTitle( $ttext, true ); # use this so DISPLAYTITLE magic works"

See also

• Extension:Collection - allows to to build collections from a number of pages. Collections can be edited, persisted and retrieved as PDF
• Extension:Pdf Export - use this extension for exporting single articles as PDF's