Folks,
I have substantial and somewhat unpleasant recent experience with print to
PDF however I maintain this is an area to "Make use of".
If anyone wants to develop PDF solutions do reach out because I have a bit
to share. Here is a brain dump;
- WYSIWYG means what is ultimately printed can have a lot to do with
each computer, the printer drivers fonts etc available.
- If you change the driver the format can change
- My Favorite free tool is Foxit Reader,
- save to PDF can be more reliable than print to PDF
- Tables are easy to create with page break headers and footers just use
<thead><tfoot><tbody> in that order (use page break avoid on rows)
- Page headers and footers will have fixed positions
- Empty invisible rows/elements with a height and page-break
after/before/inside using AVOID is the way to leave room for page header
and footer handling
- I keep it simple by using the Open in New Window before printing to
target a single tiddler, that may itself contain multiple tiddlers.
- Using the media print css allows you to format for online viewing but
on printing see the page breaking
- Annoying artifacts can occur in print preview which page scaling can
fix, I do not know how to force this scaling onto the print process.
- PDF is page description and one could generate actual PDF files with
code that handles this "language"
- This may be the only choice for high standard print composition.
- However it is easier when a PDF printer is reliable at WYSIWYG and
translating what you see to PDF
- If you do not need to dynamically generate PDF simply importing
them can reduce printer driver variances
- One Open in new window bug is resolved in 5.1.22
In closing
I have no doubt with a bit of focused effort we could simplify the process
of tiddlywiki to print processes with a set of standards including page
header and footer references, Print CSS and variations on the open in new
window button's template. If we have a nice basic standard it would be
easier to introduce more sophisticated handling of references/citations and
foot notes etc...
Remember you can introduce css to a tiddler via the class field that can
contain the screen and print css.
Regards
Tony
On Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 5:43:38 AM UTC+10, TiddlyTweeter wrote:
>
> Ciao Mark
>
> I'm commenting here as a high-end user of PDF for print, not specifically
> about TW.
>
> PDF is a de-facto standard in the print industry still. On Web it looks
> like "a" format. That is not quite right.
>
> PDF has vast possibilities on settings (resolution is critical in printing
> as is the color scheme, to suit the press, which can be tweaked endlessly).
> Its font handling is rich and allows embedding on the fly.
>
> Windows print drivers that do pdf mainly just do a common subset of
> features. A few can be manually set in the driver.
>
> I am TOTALLY UNCLEAR how you'd interact / set those refined functions PDF
> has without specialist software.
> There is likely a way on invocation but I'm unclear how.
>
> I think Mohammad's wow on Zettlr output via pandoc is its leveraging some
> of the PDF machine better than TW.
>
> But, in theory, you should be able to pass all quality and precision to
> PDF directly.
>
> Pagination in TW is an issue. I don't think its a PDF issue per se.
>
> Thoughts
> TT
>
> On Saturday, 4 April 2020 16:45:47 UTC+2, Mark S. wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, April 4, 2020 at 2:16:23 AM UTC-7, TiddlyTweeter wrote:
>>>
>>> Mohammad
>>>
>>> -- *Output/Export* to PDF, Word etc ... Point is academics need to
>>> publish research & articles.
>>> They need flexible export because different journals have
>>> different requirements.
>>>
>>> So you need flexible export, or good PDF "virtual printing".
>>>
>>> I think that is achievable in TW.
>>>
>>> It just needs* better attention to CSS print styling* (though
>>> pagination remains a more complex problem).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>> If PDF is a requirement for output, then it seems like that is the place
>> to start, especially since it would be useful for many projects.
>> But is there any example of citation-quality PDF being built in TW?
>>
>> In terms of JS capability, there's a couple projects for producing PDF
>> using JS. It's unclear whether they can be used stand-alone, or whether
>> they would depend on someone else's hosted library, or a running node.
>>
>> What would need to happen is to parse the text (possibly from markdown,
>> not wikitext), and then turn it into js commands that get executed on a TW
>> internal object. That object then gets downloaded or displayed as PDF.
>> Then there's figuring out where to insert footnotes, etc.
>>
>> Doesn't seem trivial, especially considering the small user base. But
>> maybe there's a simpler way?
>>
>> You could use CSS and then print using a PDF extension, assuming that the
>> extensions will honor page breaks. I suspect this approach would be
>> fragile.
>>
>
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