PDF generation

[BotondGalxc]

We discussed the requirement to generate PDFs based on the contents of the website.

Browsers already have the capabilities to generate PDFs of the displayed website. The project Puppeteer uses the API of a headless browser (Chrome or Firefox) to render a HTML page, which can be transformed into a PDF file with the built-in browser capabilities.

To leverage this, we can do the following:

• write a script, that compiles the .md files into one well-structured .md file
• let docusaurus render the .md file as an HTLM page
• cusomize the template for docusaurus for the page
• Use Puppeteer to render the page as pdf

Researching different other options, I found, that these pdf-generators have a short lifetime, when they are created and maintained. The "latest" version is already a few years old. I recommend to use tools which get patches and improvements regulary and combine them to our own solution.

What do you think? @ostempel @Gerrit91 @simcod

[simcod]

Thanks for pushing this topic 🚀
If I understood correctly, we would have one large Markdown file containing all of our documentation. What about the navigation bar? Will this also be generated into the PDF?

[Gerrit91]

Researching different other options, I found, that these pdf-generators have a short lifetime, when they are created and maintained. The "latest" version is already a few years old. I recommend to use tools which get patches and improvements regulary and combine them to our own solution.

100%. Do you have an example for how the PDF rendered to your proposal would look like?

[BotondGalxc]

Here is the rendered architecture page:
architecture.pdf

The page is created with docusaurus with different settings to remove things like breadcrump navigation, edit-links etc. The build command can take a different configuration file, where the settings and templates can be adapted for the pdf.

The images are missing, but I'll fix that in an upcoming step.

[Gerrit91]

Can this approach create a TOC, too?

[BotondGalxc]

Can this approach create a TOC, too?

No, and this might be a reason to look for something else.

[majst01]

I love how the PDFs look generated by typst which we use to generate the docs for one of our customers.

Maybe it can generate it from markdown as well

[Gerrit91]

Could be an interesting idea. It would also allow to style the document adequately.

https://typst.app/universe/package/cmarker/