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The plugin _(mono)wan_pdf_ generates PDF-versions of your articles. The output is a link to the PDF-file. The PDFs are not generated every time the article is called, but only when the title or the body has changed. For this plugin I used xhtml2pdf and ufpdf which are based on fpdf. All needed files can be found at the end of this article.

Attention: If you update from a version <= 0.2 please download xhtml2pdf.zip once again and delete all PDFs due to changes in the name scheme.

Example

Original article
PDF version

Installation

The installation of this plugin is a little bit more complicated than the installation of other plugins. So here are the instructions:

1. download the plugin and install and activate in the admin-panel
2. download the file xhtml2pdf.zip and unzip it to your local harddrive. After that you copy the folder xhtml2pdf (and not only the content of this folder) into the folder /textpattern/lib/ via ftp.
3. create a new style with the name _(mono)article_pdf_ and copy & paste the content of the file _(file)article_pdf.css_ into it
4. create a new file category with the name _(mono)article_pdf_

Usage

Just put the tag <txp:wan_pdf /> somewhere in you article form and there will be placed a link to the PDF-version of this article. The following optional arguments are possible:

• class: CSS-class for the link (default: class=”“)
• name: Link-text (default: name=“This article as a pdf”)
• _(mono)show_body:_ show article body in PDF (“y” or “n”, default: show_body=“y”)
• _(mono)show_excerpt:_ show excerpt in PDF (“y” or“n”, default: show_excerpt=“y”)
• image: ID of an image that is linked instead of the text (like you can see on this page). If the argument is not set, the default text is used (default: image=”“)
• _(mono)file_category:_ file categrory the PDF will belong to (default: file_category=“article_pdf”)
• _(mono)pdf_css_class:_ CSS-class for PDF-creation (default: pdf_css_class=“article_pdf”)
• debug: only for testing. The XHTML- and CSS-file are not deleted (default: debug=“n”)

The last three arguments are only for advanced users who know what they do.

How it works

With every call of an article the plugin checks, if there exists a PDF with the current version of an article. If this is not the case, first a xhtml-document with this article is created. With the help of xhtml2pdf and the stylesheet article_pdf this xhtml-document is converted into a PDF document. It will be saved in the folder files/ and put into the database at file category “article_pdf”.

If the file is already existing, the only thing the plugin does ist output a link to it.

Customization (for advanced users)

Edit the stylesheet _(mono)article_pdf_ . Also a different stylesheet can be used via the optional argument pdf_css_class.

You can edit the header and the footer of the pdf in the file /textpattern/lib/xhtml2pdf/classes/x2fpdf.php in line 377 (functions header() and footer() ).

At default the PDFs are saved in the category article_pdf. If you want to save in in another category, you have to create it and use it with category=“new_category”.

Changelog

Version 0.3 (2006-02-22)

• Feature: Use an image for linking to the PDF instead of text
• Feature: Debug switch
• Bugfix: Uses updf instead of fpdf for (hopefully) complete unicode support
• Bugfix: New name scheme (articleid_urltitle.pdf)
• Bugfix: Images in the PDF should now work everywhere

Version 0.2 (2006-01-29):

• Feature: include body and/or excerpt optionally
• Feature: write PDF metadata (thanks to ChrisJ)
• Bugfix: new name scheme for PDFs (articleid_title.pdf) to distinguish between two articles with the same title
• Bugfix: some changen in xhtml2pdf.

Version 0.16 (2006-01-25):

• Bugfix: Forgot to add the class-argument to the link

Version 0.15 (2006-01-25):

• Bugfix: replace hardcoded directories with global vars (thanks to chriloi)
• Bugfix: UTF-8-support for umlauts (thanks to chriloi)

Version 0.1 (2006-01-24):

• first version