[TYPO3-doc] thinking about PDFs ...

[Xavier Perseguers]

Hi Martin,

> thanks to Xavier rendering ReST -> LaTeX -> PDF now generally
> works. If we turn that on for Typoscript Reference 6.1 here's what
> we get:
> http://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/TyposcriptReference/_pdf/
> 
> There seem to be a lot of LaTeX warnings and the result isn't
> really nice looking yet. I'm afraid there is still a lot that
> needs to be done to make LaTeX->PDFs really enjoyable.

The warnings are "normal", even for good looking PDF, when you use LaTeX
you can just forget about having no warning unless you really tweak your
source code manually.

> On the other hand: 
> 
> A tool like the Acrobat Pro v9 Webcrawler produces quite a
> remarkable result (20 MB):
> http://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/pdf/TypoScript%20Reference%206.1.pdf
> In the case the paper size was chosen wrong and I didn't stop it
> right in time - but you get the idea. Drawback: it's done manually
> and takes a lot of time

- wkhtmltopdf
- ...

But the question is whether it makes sense, because it's a dumb "print
of a web page". Of course we should then provide a better CSS but this
could stay as HTML with just another layout. If someone wants "a pdf"
then he could print the page, just as we would do internally. I see no
need to provide a PDF ourselves, there is no value added.

The main problem with current PDF conversion are the tables and moreover
the property tables for TypoScript. Apart from that, I really like the
output of LaTeX, much more than a dummy solution like rst2pdf (just try
to convince you). rst2pdf with some tweaking could be an alternate
solution as well, I just don't have envy to investigate this.

We may deactivate PDF if it does not make sense, or only activate it on
demand for extensions that want it because rendering is good enough.

For myself, I quite like the PDF output of my 4 main extensions. Not
"perfect" but I like it quite much.

Xavier

-- 
Xavier Perseguers
Release Manager TYPO3 4.6

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