[pmwiki-users] PublishPDF version 2.0.7 released

[John Rankin]

On Wednesday, 31 May 2006 8:56 AM, Stirling Westrup <sti at pooq.com> wrote:
>John Rankin wrote:
>> A new version of the wikipublisher library is available from
>> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PublishPDF
>> 
>> The release notes are at
>> http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/index.php?n=ReleaseLog.20060527
>> 
>> The main new feature is how heading markup is handled.
>> It now takes the first 2 levels of heading on a wiki page and 
>> slots them into the overall document hierarchy. Before, it only 
>> took the first heading. This produces all round better-looking
>> documents, tables of contents, heading numbering, and so on.
>> 
>I am wondering if there are any plans to support multi-column .pdf pages
>in the future. I currently have a large number of .pdf files that are
>formatted in two columns like these two samples:
>
>  http://sti.pooq.com/archive/temp/sample1.pdf
>  http://sti.pooq.com/archive/temp/sample2.pdf
>
>and I would dearly love to move the source over to pmwiki and use
>PublishPDF to generate the .pdf files on demand.
>
>
There is already some support for 2 column output.

For publishing single pages as a two column pdf, add

(:2column:)

to the page. See 
http://www.wikipublisher.org/wiki/index.php?n=Wikipublisher.PublishingDirectives

This is fragile and you will need to experiment with
some sample pages. It works well for running prose,
headings and lists.

If your content fits the 2 column model, you can
change the default Site.PrintTemplate to set all 
single pages as 2 column, rather than adding the 
directive to every page. Or, you can add the directive 
to a GroupHeader page.

However, the following may well cause problems:
- wide tables
- large images
- preformatted text lines

In other words, anything that doesn't readily fit inside
a single column of the 2 column page.

In your examples, the tables might be a problem.
If you are willing to give it a try, we'll see if
we can work through any problems that may arise.

At the moment, we don't support 2 column output of
arbitrary page collections, as we haven't yet found a
way to do this reliably for a wide range of content.

However, it could be done.
-- 
JR
--
John Rankin