pdf export?

[logemann]

Hi,

1st of all. NICE project. Love it.

Is there any way to get a PDF out of it?

Marc

[d0ugal]

Thanks!

We don't have anything for PDFS exports at the moment.

[pcastellazzi]

I would suggest to use CSS Media Types (@media print { /* ... /* }) and something like http://wkhtmltopdf.org as a workaround.

[d0ugal]

It would be easy to achieve something like this with a custom theme.

[jgrassler]

I tried wkhtmltopdf and plenty of somethings like it (weasyprint, htmldoc, Calibre's ebook-convert). I found all of them less than satisfactory:

• wkhtml2pdf and weasyprint couldn't cope with multiple HTML files, at least without specially patched QT libraries
• htmldoc had various small conversion issues such as omitting chapter headings
• ebook-convert is a headless tool that claims to require an X server for PDF conversion - that ruled it out for our documentation machine

In a nutshell, HTML to PDF conversation is still a shaky sort of thing. Since that still holds true I chose an alternative route and hacked up a bunch of precprocessors to convert mkdocs flavored Markdown to one long document that is digestible by pandoc - which can do PDF conversion just fine. These preprocessors are a bit messy right now (some are Python, some are Ruby and others still are sed invocations in a Makefile). I can convert all that stuff into Python classes and a few extra command line options and submit the whole thing as a pull request. Would you be interested in that?

[trel]

Yes, please.

[d0ugal]

While I understand there is desire for something like this, I don't share it. @jgrassler, I would be interested in seeing how much code you would need to change to make it happen. If it is minor I could be tempted. However, I am not totally convinced (for a number of reasons) so I don't want you to invest a ton of time into it.

This is probably something that can be done as a plugin (when that becomes a realistic option #206). However, I am aware that doesn't help now.

An alternative would be to put this code into a package that people run after a mkdocs build and then they can use it that way.

[jgrassler]

It is definitely not minor. While I would not have to change much in mkdocs itself (only add a --pandoc option or something like that to the command line tool), I would have to add a whole lot of mostly independent code, though. If that works for you I'm happy to submit a pull request, but if it's too much (entirely understandable) I'd be fine with turning it into a separate package.

[d0ugal]

Let's go for a separate package for now, it is much easier to later pull things into MkDocs than it is to remove them :) Please keep us posted on this issue with how you get on, I would like to see how it works.

[jgrassler]

Alright, I'll pursue that course then :-)

For now, you will find the current mess of scripts here: http://github.com/jgrassler/mkdocs-pandoc

[jgrassler]

OK, the Python modulle is finished.

It's installable through pip:

pip install mkdocs-pandoc

It comes with a command line converter (mkdocs2pandoc).

[Breakthrough]

I've been wondering about this for some time myself, so awesome work @jgrassler (much appreciated). The Pandoc approach seems to be the way to go for the time being, looking forward to testing the new module you created :)

[mkoertgen]

Followed usage to install the stable version of mkdocs-pandocs. When calling mkdocs2pandoc i get an error relating to markdown-extensions

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\python\Scripts\mkdocs2pandoc-script.py", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('mkdocs-pandoc==0.2.3', 'console_scripts', 'mkdocs2pandoc')
()
  File "C:\python\lib\site-packages\mkdocs_pandoc\cli\mkdocs2pandoc.py", line 69
, in main
    encoding=args.encoding,
  File "C:\python\lib\site-packages\mkdocs_pandoc\pandoc_converter.py", line 52,
 in __init__
    for ext in self.config['markdown_extensions']:
KeyError: 'markdown_extensions'

I am not quite sure what this means. Did i do something stupid which can be fixed easily?

[d0ugal]

@mkoertgen Please report the issue against the mkdocs2pandoc repo: https://github.com/jgrassler/mkdocs-pandoc