Publish a PDF version of the guide

[serkandurusoy]

Today I was happily surprized to see the number of articles published on the guide.

I decided to take a plunge and check to see if there are any interesting new patterns that I can make use of myself. But I quickly missed the taste of paper on my fingertips when I get sifting through pages of a great book!

When I first started meteor, I purchased all the books out there. The ones I could only get a soft copy of, I printed them. (I know I know, but I'll save some trees using the new vast knowledge I'm getting myself acquainted with) Sometimes I print extra pages and post them on a wall. Sometimes I just print zoomed-in sections as cuecards to keep handy.

So the point is, the screen has only so much space for reading learning material and it would just be awesome if there were a pdf version of the guide for download.

[Slava]

Google Chrome (and I believe other browsers too) have an ability "to print" the page to a pdf file.

[serkandurusoy]

That ability is insufficient in many ways.

For one, it requires browsing each individual article.

Furthermore, if there are no explicitly set print-friendly styles, the resulting document does not represent the feel of a book, which defeats the whole purpose.

Margins, page breaks, code snippets, headings etc often look too wonky to be viewed as learning material.

[stubailo]

Do you know any services we could use to generate it? It is probably just a matter of having a separate print CSS and then calling out to some service.

[serkandurusoy]

There apparently are lots of API based services

I guess that could be incorporated into the hexo publish workflow

[stubailo]

@dominicnguyen if you want, you could take a stab at making some nice print CSS - could be a good start to the fancy book effort!

[serkandurusoy]

Great!

Apart from his visual genius, I'd also suggest some care for

• page numbering (css counter property can help)
• page-breaks (clear separation of sections as well as sacrificing some space in favor of intact blocks of paragraphs or code where appropriate/relevant)
• testing on A4 (international standard) rather than letter (US standard)
• switching out font-icons (if any) with their png counterparts (this is for better compatibility)

[stubailo]

I don't think we currently have any icons, so that won't be a problem.

I bet a lot of the other stuff could be fixed by converting Markdown -> LaTeX using pandoc or similar. Maybe then we don't actually need any CSS.

[serkandurusoy]

Cool, LaTeX indeed does address such concerns, but then I find formatting LaTeX documents rather (much) harder than writing print styles :)

[stubailo]

I guess the hope is that the default formatting can be good enough :P as an added bonus we can submit our work to an academic paper more easily...

[serkandurusoy]

👍

[stubailo]

So I tried wkhtmltopdf, and everything is great... except for some reason everything is italic. No idea why.

[serkandurusoy]

I searched the repo but could not find a reference to wkhtmltopdf

I'd be happy to lend a second set of eyes if you can let me in on where you're doing the conversion.

[stubailo]

Oh this was just me locally installing that program and typing some stuff in the terminal. Basically, all we need is some sort of command line tool that will work, then we can integrate it into the build process.

[serkandurusoy]

Oh, ok. Let me know if you need anything.

[necmettin]

I'm not sure if you guys are aware, so here it goes:

There is https://github.com/alanshaw/markdown-pdf
And a recipe to merge multiple markdown files into a single pdf: https://github.com/alanshaw/markdown-pdf#concat-from-multiple-paths-to-single-path

[serkandurusoy]

This does look cool and hackable!

[kwgainey]

I can't play with it tonight, but I think it's possible to clone the repo and then use GitBook.com to set it up as an ebook for downloading in various formats, including PDF. Please correct me if that's not possible. I'll try to play with it tomorrow and see what I can do. I like dead trees sometimes, too.

[kwgainey]

Okay, so technically I lied. I did play with the formatting on GitBook tonight. You can download a copy of the PDF here: https://www.gitbook.com/book/kwgainey/meteorguide/details. As I state at that link, I'm not associated with MDG, just wanted to make the guide available in PDF format. Enjoy.

[serkandurusoy]

This looks cool! Can we integrate that into our build process?

[kwgainey]

Right now, I don't have it linked to the GitHub repository for updates, but it can be setup to build the PDF on commits.

[kvetoslavnovak]

I am trying to make a GitBook linked to the GitHub repository for updates. But it seems rather tricky and the GitBook documentation is not really helpful.

[kwgainey]

@kvetoslavnovak I had problems trying to link GitBook directly to GH repository updates as well. :(

[stubailo]

GitBook definitely has its fair share of issues.

[kvetoslavnovak]

OK. I had success to build Gitbook version of the book which automatically updates from Github - https://www.gitbook.com/book/kvetoslavnovak/the-gitbook-meteor-guide/details

I had to fork the official Github meteor/guide repo to my ( https://github.com/kvetoslavnovak/GitBook-Meteor-Guide ) to approve access of Gitbook to Github.

@stubailo best way would be if MDG opens its own Gitbook account.

• when creating new book go to SETTINGS - Github tab and add meteor/guide repo link and save. Webhook URL will be generated
• then you have to copy Webhook URL from Gitbook and insert it nito Github meteor/guide repo Settings - Webhooks & services. There click Add webhook button and paste link into Payload URL and save. This should enable automatic read of updates from Github into Gitbook
• go back to Gitbook and start editing the book, the source files should be built and generated automatically from Github when you start
• the only thing you have to do is to open SUMMARY.md file in your book tree structure and paste this content that I have already created https://jsfiddle.net/x7g6doLr/ This is how content of the Gitbook is generated from Github meteor/guide content files OR just merge my reguest to add the SUMMARY.md file directly here.

There may be some formatting issues (I have noticed only chapter headings and descriptions to look strange). But I would recommend to have the Gitbook as a "dumb component" so you will only take care of Github version of the Guide. Maybe you can try to play with formatting in Github and see how it reflects in Gitbook.

If you add any chapters in the future to the Guide you should update SUMMARY.md accordingly.

EDIT: I have added SUMMARY.md file request #366 for possible merge directly here instead of upload it into Gitbook

[stubailo]

I think it's really bad for SEO to have duplicated content here and on GitBook, but using it as part of a PDF build process makes a lot of sense. I wonder if that's part of the GitBook open source tool, or if it's only available through their service.

The web UI of GitBook I think is a pretty big step down from the Guide right now - we don't get the table of contents, embedded forum thread, it is much slower to load, and we don't have analytics. So I would be very strongly against switching to GitBook for the main site.

[kvetoslavnovak]

I definitly agree. There is very easy solution:

• Make Gitbook book private so it is available on GitBook only for you
• Use GitBook only to download automaticaly generated pdf, epud and mobi versions
• Upload them on the Meteor Guide website
• Provide links to these versions on Meteor Guide page itself

[stubailo]

Excited to see if this approach works! We'll try to get on it in the next few days.

[matheusjardimb]

any solutions on this one?

[yvan-sraka]

pandoc could also be a good tool to automated Markdown to Latex to PDF conversion 😉!

[Falieson]

About to go on a long flight, I wish I could download a pdf of the guide!

[abernix]

@Falieson I imagine you've probably already taken your flight, but as a suggestion to others, the "Dash" app from Kapeli has (up to date!) Meteor docs as one of their downloadable options – it works offline!

This isn't the solution to this issue necessarily, but an option!

[filipenevola]

I'm closing this issue because it's too old.

We are going to make many updates to the guide in the next weeks and it's better to focus on issues with recent activity. If you think this issue is still relevant please open a new one.