Hi Alex On Saturday, February 4, 2012 1:08:41 AM UTC, Alex Buckley wrote: > > DocBook is good for "real" books where you want to/have to produce a > PDF, thanks to the DocBook-XSL stylesheet package. How do you produce > PDF from HTML5 source?
I have been experimenting with using DocBook / DITA and XML-safe HTML5 and my requirements are: - Produce PDF output with both clickable TOC pages with outline/bookmarks - Produce vanilla HTML5 output files that can be assembled by some very basic PHP scripts - Produce JSON TOC that can be used by the very basic PHP scripts for context sensitive sidebar My initial thoughts were to use DocBook or a custom XML schema. On the plus side this would mean that I can take advantage of DocBook's powerful feature set, but on the minus side the schema is quite a learning curve given limited time constraints plus WYSIWYG editing seems like a no go. Certainly the XML tools that I tried have terrible WYSIWYG for XML formats. My next thought was to take advantage of the new semantic elements of HTML5 and make use of classes and data-* attributes when additional semantics are useful. I had a number of concerns with this approach including those mentioned in this thread (inconsistent WYSIWYG experience with excess browser generated junk; plus inability to produce quality PDF file). The only CSS3 processor that I can find that fully supports paged media types (Prince) is way too expensive. After a LOT of research here are my findings: - wkhtmltopdf is absolutely fantastic at converting HTML5 to PDF. Whilst its support for paged media types is limited to the offerings of WebKit, the command line interface allows custom cover page(s) to be added, an automatically generated TOC (using HTML5 outline), ability to specify custom header and footers using custom HTML files (with JavaScript access to wkhtmltopdf properties). Plus all links (and TOC) are clickable and the PDF outline is generated beautifully. *PDF Output: *Tick - WYSIWYG support that is consistent across browsers with clean HTML5 compliance is possible with thanks to the Aloha Editor: http://aloha-editor.org/. With the addition of a very simple "static" content management system the process of creating, managing and editing static pages is very easy. *WYSIWYG: *Tick - Generation of JSON TOC to support navigation on PHP powered website is easily generated with custom XSLT2 stylesheets by first concatenating the contents of all HTML pages in order, and then scanning the H1-6 tags (whilst respecting HTML5 section/article/aside/etc) *Easy to use website: *Tick For me the final part of the puzzle has been bringing all of these things together in a way that is easy to manage. I am considering using *chromiumembedded *within a C# Forms application using a simple embedded HTTP server to glue all of the above together. Note: I am not writing the CMS using PHP, but rather using C# for easier access to Saxon (XSLT2 processing). After serious consideration this seems to be the easiest approach overall (whilst a little extra initial preparation is required). Though at this stage I am not committed to this approach, I am still in the experimental phase really. I am looking for something with flexibility over visual styles (which DocBook seems to lack), whilst maintaining good semantics, whilst having both HTML and PDF output that are both consistent in style and easy to use. And hopefully far easier to edit using WYSIWYG. Whilst I do not mind manually typing XML elements around my text when writing XML comments, I can see this becoming very tedious when writing large amounts of technical documentation. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Java Posse" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/javaposse/-/mkbprtHhrl4J. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
