Forum Posts Converted To PDF Files

[TCurry]

My forums contain a lot of tutorials, many of which are quite long and contain many images.

It would be really useful for my users to be able to click on a small PDF button in a thread to convert the item/page to a pdf file, download and print/view it off line - similar to the add-on you can get for Joomla (which incidentally I don't actually use).

I've done quite an extensive search for the term PDF on here, but all the results seem to be related to the SMF documentation or integrating SMF with other software.

Does anyone know if this can be done or if anyone has created an SMF add-on which will do this - or something similar, apart from just printing the screen when viewing?

Many thanks in advance for any info...

TB

[metallica48423]

I don't believe there is a pdf option, but i do know there is a print page to give a printer friendly format.  look at your option bar (the one with reply, etc on it) here and at your board and you should see 'print'.

for example, the print button of this page goes to:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?action=printpage;topic=181274.0

[L.G.S]

Come to think of it, a PDF function for posts would be awesome.

[MrPhil]

It would certainly be a lot easier to create the information as a PDF in the first place, and just put a link ([url] tag) in the posting. I believe that some word processors can save a document directly in PDF format, and some markup processors (e.g., LaTeX) can create PDF documents. By the way, PDF is best for printing; it's considered to be not a very good way to view material online because it's paper-sheet-oriented.

On the other hand, if you're looking to convert existing postings or threads to PDF after the fact, it's possible. It may be ugly and messy, but with enough effort anything can be done. You'd have a "make PDF" button/link to pass off the information needed for some other processor to access the postings/thread in the database. That processor would either directly create the PDF file from the BBC markup in the database, or convert it to some other format (e.g., LaTeX markup) and fire up the appropriate processor, all in the background. If your Web host won't permit that, you might have to semi-manually download the database text/markup to your PC and create the PDF there. That might produce better results anyway, because you can review and tweak the results before publishing it.

Good Luck!

[metallica48423]

i see it being a mod more than a feature.

I'll go ahead and move this to mod requests and see if it flies