Re: Generating aggregate PDF's

[Johannes Schaefer <jo...@uidesign.de>]

Stephen Schaub wrote:

> As a followup to my previous post -- Oops -- I just re-read the original
> thread, and realized that I misunderstood the topic under discussion.
> 
> So let me start a new thread on the issue of specifying subset aggregate
> documents for PDF generation. I'll quote my previous post again here for
> convenience:
> 
> Forrest needs a good mechanism for specifying a subset of pages to convert
> to PDF. I suggest that we explore something like this (hypothetical section
> of a site.xml):
> 
> <about label="About" >
>     <home label="Home" href="index.html" />
>     <vision label="NextGen Vision" href="vision.html"   />
>     <ranking label="Ranking" href="ranking.html" />
> 
>     <printout label="Printout" href="printout.pdf" pdfonly="true">
>       <pdf_overview label="Overview">
>           <pdf_vision label="NextGen Vision" href="vision.html"   />
>  <pdf_ranking label="Ranking" href="ranking.html" />
>       </pdf_overview>
>       <pdf_usecases label="Use cases" href="usecases/" >
>         <pdf_uc_summary label="Summary" href="index.html" />
>         <pdf_process_sale label="Process Sale" href="process_sale.html" />
>         <pdf_handle_returns label="Handle Returns"
> href="handle_returns.html" />
>         <pdf_submit_solution label="Submit Solution"
> href="submit_solution.html" />
>       </pdf_usecases>
>     </printout>
> </about>
> 
> Notice the <printout> element with attribute pdfonly="true". This defines a
> set of project documents to include in a pdf named printout.pdf. Unlike the
> current "pdf-tab" approach, the children of the <printout> element would not
> appear in the menu.
> 
> This approach would allow me to specify not only which documents to include
> in a PDF, but also the ordering and structure of the documents.

We encountered something similar that might result
in a common solution: we want the PDF to have
certain pages that the html version doesn't need
(e.g. a titlepage) or reorder the content (in pdf
put the document info up front, on the web it's
somewhere back in the appendix). I'm not sure if
this matches your suggestions, though. I thought
even about having a special pdfsite.xml and/or
pdfconf.xml ...

Cheers
Johannes



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