PDFreactor files for testing

This repo contains a number of examples, illustrating how PDFreactor can be used in Booktype. To be more precise: information on what a new export script needs to be capable of, to create the HTML and CSS which is needed by PDFreactor.

Booktype is currently creating PDF files with mpdf. Orphans, widows and hyphenation are not managed well by mpdf, which is why we add the option to create PDFs using the proprietary PDFreactor solution.

(Other proprietary export renderers can be added, like PrinceXML. We decided to go with PDFreactor, because their support of baseline-grid is making it that bit more attractive. The open source version vivliostyle is impressive, but does not support hyphenation... yet. For details, see the great site www.print-css.rocks.)

If you have PrinceXML installed, you can also create PDFs from the HTML/CSS files to get an impression of what they will come out like. In your terminal, move to the folder with the HTML/CSS file and type (.e.g.):

prince -s pdfreactor-style.css pdfreactor-body.html -o princexml.pdf

This will create a PDF by the name of pdfreactor-body.pdf

Running PDFreactor from the command line

Yuo can create PDF files using the command line as well. After downloading the Tarball from http://www.pdfreactor.com/download/ and extracting it (anywhere) on your system, you can use the following command to create a PDF:

cd /path/to/pdfreactor/html/file/; /path/to/pdfreactor/bin/pdfreactor.py -i body-pdfreactor.html -o pdfreactor.pdf

Important: the CSS file needs to be in the same folder AND the css file needs to be linked in the header of the HTML file. Inside the CSS file, you need to link to the font files as a relative path.

Structure

• samples/ contains the folders with relevant HTML, CSS files
• samples/Fonts/ contains all fonts used anywhere in the CSS samples
• lib/ contains the PDF wrapper for PDreactor

Inside a sample directory

There are sample PDF files:

• samples/BT_theme_academic/static_mpdf_test.pdf
• samples/BT_theme_academic/static_pdfreactor_test.pdf

There are the mpdf HTML and CSS files for reference:

• samples/BT_theme_academic/mpdf-endmatter.html
• samples/BT_theme_academic/mpdf-frontmatter.html
• samples/BT_theme_academic/mpdf-body.html (this is the mainmatter)

And there are the PDFreactor files which will be rendered. If you start a new sample folder, make sure they are named like the following, because this is what the php file is looking for:

• samples/BT_theme_academic/pdfreactor-body.html
• samples/BT_theme_academic/pdfreactor-style.css

The following two CSS files are included by pdfreactor-style.css. They are optional - including the fonts and page size:

• samples/BT_theme_academic/_PDFRfonts.css
• samples/BT_theme_academic/_PDFRpagesize.css

Install

• You need to have PDFreactor Web Service installed. See www.pdfreactor.com
• Open pdfreactorwebservice-start.sh and change the path to match your dir structure
• Start the PDFreactor Web Service by typing ./pdfreactorwebservice-start.sh
• Open the file index.php and change the relative paths to match the HTML and CSS file you want to use for PDF rendering.
• Make sure this repo is available through your browser on localhost.
• Open the URL in a browser (e.g. http://localhost/pdfreactorexamples/).