[Bf-docboard] About a new PDF version of the wiki

[marco ardito]

Hi all,

in the past (2.4x) I already did a Blender wiki > PDF conversion, hosted 
on archive.org, but also linked by the official wiki manual pages, see 
top of this page: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual

The whole process is basically:
1) download everything needed (wiki pages, images)
2) adapt downloaded html
3) convert adapted html to a single pdf

To be honest in this version the result was not very good (one for all: 
no unicode support => lots of encoding quirks!) mainly because step 3 
was based on HTMLdoc
(see 
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta:Tools/Wiki_conversions/Wiki_to_PDF/HTMLDoc)

Then came the 2.5x days, and the wiki content was completely revamped 
because nearly everything changed in Blender UI and features, but then 
also the wiki style and features were completely revamped as it is now, 
so I decided to wait.

A few months ago, since the English wiki seemed quite complete and 
stable again, I looked for some way to improve the old conversion 
process and I found a new method for step 3, based on wkhtmlpdf. The 
results are quite good, still not perfect but definitely better!
You can see the last two versions here: 
https://archive.org/details/BlenderWikiPDFManual

Do any bf-docboard "manager" feel it could be worth to include any info 
about this downloadable PDF anywhere on the 2.6x wiki, as it was (and 
still is) for 2.4x? I could take care of maintaining this, in the wiki, 
as I did in the past.

I already posted news about this new PDF in BA forums but I still feel 
the most logical place is just near its source, the wiki itself, of 
course. As said, it is now hosted on archive.org, but I could upload 
this PDF elsewhere, even on Blender.org servers, if needed.

About publishing the conversion script, quite simple but still rough, is 
nothing too complicated for any basic php coder, but I'm concerned that 
it could be somehow dangerous to make it (too) easy for anyone to 
download the whole wiki content (images ant text): too many people using 
it could cause very high load on wiki servers, I fear: I don't want to 
harm Blender servers (for latest release I downloaded around 640 wiki 
pages and nearly 100 MB of images).

-- 
*Marco*



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