Author in wiki, generate PDF documents, CHM files or embedded help - pdf-generation

Anyone know of a wiki or wiki plugin that generates a PDF file or CHM file that spans the entire wiki?
I would like to have control of the table of contents.
I would like the internal and external links to work.
Ideally allow for tweaking the output template, but that is not a deal-breaker.
I want to generate content using WIKI syntax and mindset (lots of cross-links etc), but ship the content in PDF, CHM or an embedded application form. Something friendlier than installing the wiki software on the enduser machine...

XWiki does this out of the box.

The MediaWiki PDF Export extension allows you to select a group of PDF pages. I've not installed it yet, so unsure if it's easy to use that feature to select all the pages.

Confluence lets you choose pages when you export to PDF a space
But you can't customise a lot the PDF
You can customise it slightly through a theme (based on velocity)

Sphinx (https://www.sphinx-doc.org) is a fairly nice tool for generating HTML (or CHM) and PDF documentation, with wiki-like syntax. It is not a wiki; you can't edit through the web and generating HTML requires a build process. Still, it is pretty nice, with cross-references, fairly simple markup, and (in the HTML output) a search engine implemented in JavaScript with no server-side dependencies beyond static file hosting. Sphinx was developed for the new version of the Python documentation and is pretty themable; for example, the GeoServer project (which I work on, excuse the shameless plug) is using Sphinx with a custom theme for the new version of their user and developer manuals.

JIRA (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/default.jsp) is your geeky wet dream in terms of control; it exports to PDF (amongst other) and you can have complete control of pages, TOC and other aspects, although expect some complexity to set it up.

Microsoft has an HtmlHelp Authoring tool that can create chm files from html files.
If you need the help files both on the web and within deployed applications, generating the help from the same files used on the web could be a great solution. If the help site was created using asp.net (ie database driven) it might be worth using basic styles and creating a tool to generate html files by reading in the served out pages?
Have a look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms524239(VS.85).aspx
I guess one could also additionally then create a PDF from the Html pages?

Related

What is the correct way to create a modular site from asciidoc files?

I have lot of documentation written in AsciiDoc and correctly separated into folders. I use asciidoctor with a custom CSS to render my docs to HTML. The problem with this is that it generates a single HTML page that is very long. I was surfing the web and found that the atom docs are also written in AsciiDoc, but these docs have not all the information together, in fact they are separated into different sections.
Here the atom docs: https://atom.io/docs/v0.201.0/getting-started-why-atom
I want to know if there is a tool that can generate this, a flag or a specific syntax.
I think it is not really user friendly to have all the info in one long single page.
I have a site where the static content is generated using the asciidoctor-jekyll plugin and jekyll.
I had also plugged the java version of asciidoctor to generate views with the play framework at some point but decided that I prefer that the content I generate with asciidoctor to be static and delivered by a CDN.
EDIT:
Also, GitBookIO supports asciidoctor.

Good tool to create documentation for jQuery plugin?

I wrote a Javascript (jQuery) plugin. Now I want to write a documentation site for it. Is there a good tool to create such a site out of some offline file formats or works like a CMS?
I know this answer has been asked before, but the last answers are from 2011. Is there anything new that does an awesome job in writing documentation?
There are a few new tools for generating websites or blogs from code/directory.
Bootstrap v3 just switched to jekyll for documentation. jekyll knows how to process Markdown or Liquid (markdown flavours)
Grunt.js is also used for all sorts of automated task. One of these being documentation generation. Search their plugin list for doc
assemble.io is another tool for generating documentation pages
I'll extend if I bump into others. I am not sure if this is exactly what you need, but they are general purpose so I am sure a jQuery plugin can fit in.

Generate a business letter for 100+ leads using wkhtmltopdf

We need to print Business Letter for a given list with mail merge facilities.
My client is not willing to spend $$ on a paid ASP.NET control to make PDF. So I opted in for WKHTMLtoPDF and it works fine for us until one day the client tried to get a PDF of 100+ leads, resulting in complete failure of PDF generation. It works just fine with a 10-20 page PDF, but not for 100.
Are there any tips & tricks to improve performance? We are using Cloud-hosted IIS 7 with ASP.NET 4 if that matters.
PDFSharp library is really a nice one!
I have used it for quite a while now, and I find it flexible enough to fulfill your needs.
However there are some aspects of using it as a "standalone library" - e.g creating tables is a headache and there aren't much text formatting options. It is much better to mix it together with MigraDoc (an extension library for PDFSharp).
If you're looking for a really free (as in "free of worries") library, choose iTextPDF versions prior to version 4.1.7, as they state in the ByteScout blog.
From the ByteScout blog:
iTextSharp 4.1.6 DLL only: itextsharp-4.1.6-dll.zip
iTextSharp 4.1.6 Source Code (C#): itextsharp-4.1.6.zip
I'm not sure I understand your problem but couldn't you generate docx documents and get the same results?
For all, I use http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ to create HTML to PDF, my ASP.NET code generate the HtML file then I create HTML to PDF and it is done, much easier than using itextpdf's Table and td structure to get things in better space. I found it easy and fast once you get your stuff aligned properly.
library has improved since original question asked and it performs better now.
here is good tutorial http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20640/Creating-PDF-Documents-in-ASP-NET

Content Management System - PHP - Asp.Net

I am new to open source Content Management System tools. I got a website using Joomla for content management. Now, I am just thinking to Umbraco or Dotnetnuke (any Asp.net based) frameworks to use. Will it be a complex to do this migration. Can you suggest pros and cons for this idea.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks !
For Umbraco ...
Most of your client-side code like HTML, CSS and JavaScript can just be copied straight over, but as expected it may require some fiddling.
As for the data, it might be worth looking into the CMSImport module for Umbraco. As long as you can convert the source data into one of the formats recognised by the module, you should be able to upload your content with ease. I've had no personal experience with this module, but should be worth a shot.
It really depends on the size of the site and the functionality requirements. For smaller sites, it may be as easy as implementing the skin based on the original design (or, if a custom design isn't needed, selecting a free or 3rd party skin) and then manually migrating the content. For really large sites, you should be able to write scripts to migrate the content. I'm not aware of any products that do this. You'll also probably need to select some modules to use for things like forms.

online pdf generation

I'm looking to create PDF files instantly online given user input in my html/php page.
are there any FREE API's out there that will allow me to do this?
various options, here are a couple:
Prince XML
wkhtmltopdf
TCPDF
HTML2PDF
PDF converter
PDFSharp
pdflib
formatter coverters
Php uses the PDFlib library, it has a lot of pdf functions, check it out here http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php
You could probably use pdflib
Hi You have two or three approaches:
1) If you can work with XML, that is, the source of your PDF file is in XML format, you could use XSL and XSL:Fo to generate the PDF. XSL and Fo are declarative languages so you can control the PDF layout external to your application. Fo creates only documents, not interactive forms.
2) If you can work in Java, you could use iText to generate the PDF using a jar/api. There is also iTextSharp for C#. Using iText, you can also create PDF Forms, not just documents.
3) If you have XHTML and just want to create PDFs that look like your HTML pages, there are several options - just search the web for HTML to PDF converters.
If your pdf isn't overly complex, you should look into XFDF before making an architectural decision. The main benefit to this approach is that there is no need to store pdf's in the db or on hard drive. Additionally, I have seen many pdf generation implementations that use home grown batch processes that are buggy and only create another 'moving part' in an application. If you have very complex pdf needs and don't mind the overhead of storing the pdfs, pdflib is a good choice.

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