Generate PDF/Docbook from a Alfresco Wiki

[hans]

Hi @ all,

we want to use our wiki better and therfour we are trying to find a way how to export our ALfresco wiki (we have community edition) into a PDF or a DocBook.
I read a bit about dita open Toolkit and Oxygen Editor but not happy with that.

How do you guys manage exporting content from Alfresco?
Does somebody export Alfresco content (especially from Wiki) into a pdf or Docbook?

Happy about any help.

kind regards
Hans

[afaust]

Hello,

we have implemented PDF exporting capabilities for some customers. Usually, they relate to a specific set of documents, i.e. within a workflow (to get a offline view of the relevant documents for asynchronous review) or a specific structure of the document library (patient record documents export for an on-the-road assessor). Most of the time, this can be done by using the PDF conversion features of Alfresco and then assembling the various PDFs to one large bundle via the PDFBox library.
We have not yet looked into DocBook exports and/or (subsequent) conversion to PDFs, but this should be doable. The main hurdle here for most people is the necessary competence in Java development to engineer such a solution within the Alfresco Repository.
An approach to export Wiki contents into PDF directly (but without interlinking) could be implemented by using a HTML-to-PDF renderer such as <a href="http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/">wkhtmltopdf</a> for converting single articles into PDF.

Regards
Axel

[cibex]

Hi,
we are looking for a similar solution.
We are planning to integrate a tool/editor for working on manuals online and print them to pdf.
The out-of-the-box wiki is not suitable because of different reasons:
No support for chapters, auto numbering of headers, table of content, index, glossary,…

In Plone CMS we were using this: https://github.com/4teamwork/ftw.book
It´s  main features:

* Provides a content type "Book" which defines the root of a book.
* Provides a content type "Chapter" for creating the structure of a book. Chapters are nestable.
* Content is added to chapters using simplelayout blocks (text and images).
* Provides an action for exporting the book or a single chapter recursively as PDF (CSS formatted, very important feature!)
* Provides a "Reader" view which displays the book on one page for a enjoyable reading experience.
* Provides simplalayout "Table" block for enter tabular data using a datagrid widget which generates HTML table representation which also convertable into a PDF.

Other supported features, we don´t need
* Provides LaTeX representations for the default simplelayout blocks.
* Adds fields for injecting LaTeX code to every content type within a book using schemaextender.



I´m thinking about a simple and stable solution to achieve this. Options I see:
* Extend the wiki features
* Integrate a solution like docbook with its own editor (different editors are not very comfortable for end users)
* Extend this manual manager provided by Peter Löfgren Loftux AB: https://github.com/loftuxab/manual-manager
* developing from scratch, if above solutions won´t work.

Are there any other possible solutions I don´t see?
We have to implement this feature in any case so everyones suggestions are welcome.

cheers & thx!

Josef