Extension:PdfBook

From mediawiki.org
MediaWiki extensions manual
PdfBook
Release status: stable
Implementation Data extraction
Description Composes a book from articles in a category and exports as a PDF file
Author(s)
Latest version 3.1.0 (2023-08-10)
Compatibility policy For every MediaWiki release that is a Long Term Support release there is a corresponding branch in the extension.
MediaWiki 1.39+
PHP 7.4.x
Database changes No
License GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download

  • $wgPdfBookTab
  • $wgPdfBookDownload

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

Overview[edit]

Categories are a good way of organizing many articles, which comprise a book. One can use the sort keys in the "pages" categorization statements to ensure they are correctly ordered. This extension allows such categories to be compiled into downloadable PDF files with a table of contents, each page forming the start of a new chapter.

Installation[edit]

Usage[edit]

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

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:foo&action=pdfbook

A more generic way of creating the link is to use the "fullurl" parser function and {{FULLPAGENAME}} variable as in the following example:

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

This link can then be added to a template which can be transcluded into any category or page 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:Category-article-count page.

This extension also allows books to be generated from non-category pages as well. If the page to be downloaded as a book is not a category, then the extension will extract the titles from page 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

Raw HTML output[edit]

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

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=html

Single page exports[edit]

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

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=single

Page Breaks[edit]

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

Configuration[edit]

Here are the parameters which affect the operation of the extension. These should be set in your "LocalSettings.php" file after invoking the extension.

Variable Default value Meaning
$wgPdfBookTab false Defines whether or not an action tab is wanted for printing to PDF
$wgPdfBookDownload true Defines whether or not the files should be downloaded or viewed in-browser

Limitations[edit]

  • UTF-8 support of HTMLDOC is limited to the first 128 Unicode characters found in the input.

See also[edit]