I’ve been a big fan of MediaWiki and similar wiki-based text editors. I like the ability to quickly add text, collaborate, and share. However, there’s always still the need for nicely formatted print output. Things like headers and footers (that say what I want them to say), page breaks, margins, etc.
Most solutions I’ve seen involve some sort of conversion to a intermediate print-media format (maybe MediaWiki to Microsoft Word or maybe some custom scripting that generates a PDF from the contents of a web page (with a lot of hard-coded references).
Is there any more generic solution that exists for this problem? Any framework that seeks to merge HTML and web content in general into a print media output format?
Any solutions, discussion regarding the pro’s or con’s, or whatever is welcome.
Thanks!
Update: I think CSS will only get me so far though… I’ve used CSS for similar type output (MediaWiki by default has a print format that hides much of the nav bar stuff). Think of a MediaWiki article though — imagine me being able to tweak a tag in the content or something similar and now my margin is 1 inch instead of .5 inches. That’s more along the lines of what I’m aiming for.
You may have heard of PediaPress, a company that has done a ‘wiki to print’ (i.e PDF, but also ODF) deal with the Wikimedia Foundation. (See ‘Wikis Go Printable’.) Their code is designed to work with MediaWiki and is open source.
But! It’s even better than that. Check out this bookmarklet. You can use it to create PDFs or ODFs of any publicly-accessible MediaWiki page (maybe it needs the API to be enabled too…). And you can bundle multiple pages, from a single MediaWiki or multiple MediaWikis, into a single document. It’s pretty freaking awesome in my book. 🙂
ETA: PediaPress have put significant work into making something that looks really nice to read. It’s not just the equivalent of MediaWiki’s printable version converted to PDF.