Extension:PdfBook

MediaWiki extensions manual

PdfBook Release status: stable
Implementation	Data extraction
Description	Composes a book from articles in a category and exports as a PDF file
Author(s)	Aran Dunkley Igor Absorto
Latest version	3.1.0 (2023-08-10)
Compatibility policy	For every MediaWiki release that is a Long Term Support release there is a corresponding branch in the extension.
MediaWiki	1.39+
PHP	7.4.x
Database changes	No
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 or later
Download	GitHub: project page git repository URL [help ] commit history Note: No localisation updates are provided by translatewiki.net .
Parameters $wgPdfBookTab $wgPdfBookDownload
Hooks used SkinTemplateNavigation::Universal

The PdfBook extension composes a book from pages in a category and exports them as a PDF file.

Overview

Categories are a good way of organizing many articles comprising a book. One can use the sort keys in the "pages" categorization statements to ensure they are correctly ordered. This extension allows such categories to be compiled into downloadable PDF files with a table of contents, each page forming the start of a new chapter.

Usage

The PDF creation is initialized by the "pdfbook" action, so a category can be downloaded as a PDF book directly from a link such as:

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Category:foo&action=pdfbook

A more generic way of creating the link is to use the "fullurl" parser function and {{FULLPAGENAME}} variable as in the following example:

[{{fullurl:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|action=pdfbook}} download this selection of pages as a PDF book]

This link can then be added to a template which can be transcluded into any category or page suitable for downloading as a book. For an example of such a template, see OrganicDesign:Category:I am that, which uses OrganicDesign:Template:Book to display the message and download link.

In order to include this parser function link automatically to every category page, add it to the Mediawiki:Category-article-count page.

This extension also allows books to be generated from non-category pages as well. If the page to be downloaded as a book is not a category, then the extension will extract the titles from page links in a bullet list. The list may be explicitly defined, or may be the result of a query. For an example of this functionality, see Creating a PDF book from a DPL query

Raw HTML output

You can download the file as a single HTML document by setting format=html in the query-string. Example:

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=html

Single page exports

You can export a single page as a one-page PDF by setting format=single in the query-string. Example:

https://www.example.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=pdfbook&format=single

Page Breaks

You can add page breaks into your book by adding <!-- PAGE BREAK --> into the relevant places in the content pages.

Installation

• Htmldoc needs to be installed
• Download, extract and place the file(s) in a directory called PdfBook in your extensions/ folder.
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'PdfBook' );
  

• Configure as required.
•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Configuration

This extension provides the following configuration parameters, which should be added below invoking the extension in your "LocalSettings.php" file:

Variable	Default value	Meaning
$wgPdfBookTab	false	Defines whether or not an action tab is wanted for printing to PDF
$wgPdfBookDownload	true	Defines whether or not the files should be downloaded or viewed in-browser

Limitations

• UTF-8 support of HTMLDOC is limited to the first 128 Unicode characters found in the input.

See also

• PDF export - summary of all PDF export extensions