Re: [Boost-docs] HTML to PDF translations?

Subject: Re: [Boost-docs] HTML to PDF translations?
From: John Maddock (john_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-02-11 16:51:30

> John's PDF translations have generated a lot of positive comments. Can
> we do something similar with HTML based documentation?
>
> I've been using Bullzip (http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php)
> to generate PDF from HTML. It works fine as a pseudo-printer, but what
> we need is an html to pdf converter.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with a html to pdf converter that
> would be suitable for automatically generating pdf's for libraries
> that don't want to use quickbook?

I think this would be hard: I toyed with the idea of a quick and dirty HTML 
to DocBook converter so we could do just this, but one of the main issues is 
structure - or rather the lack of it in html documentation - there's nothing 
to tell you in what order to place the hmtl "pages".  Also things like 
manually written tables of contents don't work half as well in PDF format as 
a good PDF chapter/section outline.

I had a quick experiment with converting the reST docs into PDF's, and these 
seem to suffer from the same issues - one reST document is one HTML page, 
with hyperlinks between them hardcoded as links to the generated html, and 
no way to tell what order to place them in inside a single PDF :-(

So... sadly I don't think a fully automated solution is possible,

John.