The PDF is made by Confluence itself. From a few years experience with Confluence, though, I'm not sure this is going to make it very high on Atlassian's priority list - there are a lot of larger problems with the PDF export that have been there for years that they haven't bothered to address.
At any rate, we have a historical PDF already - it's the 5.5 Ref Guide. What we actually need in this case is the ability to export the content into a different space in Confluence so we could edit the content for 5.5, then make a PDF of that. The idea of a 5.5 addendum could work, but keep in mind the changes that have been made throughout the Guide for 6.0 aren't just adding a couple of pages for new features. There are numerous changes for default Solr behavior (i.e., Similarity, default to managed-schema, UI screenshots) that are essentially inline with content that was there before. That would all need to be backed out, or explained somehow. I'm not sure a single page that says "Hey, all that stuff you see everywhere about managed-schema being default, ignore that" is going to be all that helpful. On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:39 PM, Shawn Heisey <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/14/2016 12:57 PM, Cassandra Targett wrote: > > Unfortunately, Confluence makes that pretty impossible without some > > super-human efforts*. Each page has a history, but the only snapshot > > that exists of the full pre-6.0 state is the PDF, and it would be > > nearly impossible to recreate the 5.5 version from that in order to > > make a 5.6. > > > > *With direct access to the (mySQL, I assume) backend database, one > > could theoretically reconstruct the prior versions, but suspect it > > would be a likely thankless and painful task that would be more work > > than it's worth. > > Is the conversion to PDF done by something external, or by Confluence > itself? > > If it's done by Confluence, then I would think it would be possible for > them to create a "Export from historical date" feature. I would not > expect that to be a trivial implementation, but *possible* ... and we > should open an issue in their Jira. > > If it's an external tool, it would probably still be possible, but the > dev team might need to learn a bunch of things that the Atlassian > developers already know. > > Since there's no ability to create a historical PDF right now, a "5.6 > addendum" PDF that contains changes since 5.5 sounds like the reasonable > thing to do. Hopefully there would not be much in the way of changes > that require documentation updates. > > Thanks, > Shawn > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] > For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] > >
