Photobook

A framework to create photobooks.

For long time I wished to find a straightful way to create photobooks in pdf, but I couldn't find an application to make it. Recently I came across with the great piece of code cognitom/paper-css and I began to imagine a solution.

This is the (work in progress) result of this job, it is not perfect, but it works very well for me. I hope it can be usefull for you too.

Installation

The project is based on other projects: Smarty as template engine and cognitom/paper-css for the css formatting of pages; I also used spyc for YAML management.

Copy all the files in your working folder.

Download Smarty from https://www.smarty.net/ and put it in /include/smarty/ and configure the template and cache folders (see documentation)

cognitom/paper-css is used from the cdnjs, so you get it without installation, but if you prefer to have everything on your server change files accordingly.

mustangostang/spyc is used to manage YAML instead of php extension, so you should not have dependencies problems. Download it and put it in /include/spyc.

Create a YAML file in your root (keep the extension yaml) and enjoy this piece of code.

Configuration

In the YAML file there are all the input for the system to prepare your photobook. See the photobook.yaml file as example.

• title : It's just a tag;
• format : the format of your page see cognitom/paper-css, available page sizes are:
  • A5, A5 landscape
  • A4, A4 landscape
  • A3, A3 landscape
  • letter, letter landscape
  • legal, legal landscape
• stylesheet : stylesheet for your project (in /css folder);
• dsphoto_url : sometimes it is useful to have a short path to most frequently used folder ex. http://example.com/images/, photobook will use it to link images in dsphoto (see below);
• pages : from here the list of pages;
• class : a custom class
• print_pn : true|false, if print the page number in that page or not;
• pn : if present photobook will use that number as page number, otherwise it will increment the previous page number;
• frames : the list of frames in this page;
• type : text|image
• data : link to the photo or text (accept all the html/css tags);
• dsphoto : short path to the photo, the full path is dsphoto_url+dsphoto;
• hdim : horizontal dimension of the frame;
• vdim : vertical dimension of the frame;
• xpos : horizontal position of the frame from left;
• ypos : vertical position of the frame from top;
• align : if the frame is text, its horizontal alignment;
• hzoom : auto or horizontal dimension of the picture inside the frame, so you can make it larger;
• vzoom : auto or vertical dimension of the picture inside the frame, so you can make it larger;
• hpan : horizontal position of the picture inside the frame;
• vpan : vertical position of the picture inside the frame;

Use

Call the web page to see your progressing work.

http://www.mydomain.com/photobook/index.php?pb=<your-photobook>&p=0-9

It gets 2 parameters:

• pb= : parameter is mandatory to call your YAML configuration file (it is the YAML filename with no extention);
• p= : optional, it is useful when the number of pages and pictures increase to limit the amount of data. It starts from 0 and it gets page range as a printer so you can do for example: 0-3,5

Make the PDF

Now the interesting part.

You can print the web page in several ways:

• print from the browser, as usual;
• use some shell command (for example wkhtmltopdf
• or other...

But my best choice is using Puppeteer, it takes a little bit to manage it, but it woth the time.

printpdf.js file is an example file to create the pdf this way.

Warning

I'm not a professional developer, and this tool is meant for personal use, so it is imperfect, buggy and so on. Use it without any warrenty. Any contribute is welcome.