Export to pdf

[jackycute]

Support export to pdf is important.
Previous research the result is not very satisfied.
But we found gitprint and it's opensource, might try that again.

https://github.com/adamburmister/gitprint.com
https://github.com/alanshaw/markdown-pdf

[amigrave]

Why not using wkhtml2pdf on the generated html ?

[jackycute]

I don't know wkhtml2pdf before, looks good and will give it a try.
But see from the https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues
It has lots of issue not solved.

Anyway, thanks for help!

[jackycute]

Use markdown-pdf right now, not bad.

[jvoisin]

What about pandoc (#48) ;)

[amigrave]

Pandoc will export to pdf using it's renderer which is not aware of all the extra components supported by hackmd (eg: mathjax, diagram, google emojis, ... )

Converting the generated html to pdf is the best bet if we want to support all the javascript exotic features. and as a bonus, it will give you the same look/styles that you actually see in hackmd versus a custom renderer which would render with different styles.

[vincfleurette]

Could you add a way to integrate the summary in the pdf export ?

[jackycute]

Hi @vincfleurette,
Could you tell more about "the summary" ?

[amlwwalker]

What could be nice is adding a PDF export button for something like https://docraptor.com/ for those who are happy to pay for the conversion. PDF generation is always tedious from things like markdown, but as HTML export is already implemented, it could be a simple solution? Example code on their website on how to POST HTML to docraptor, and get back a PDF, which you then offer to the user via download... Just a thought...

[jackycute]

@amlwwalker good point!
I found out how dillinger did their PDF export yesterday, we might be able to do this too.
https://github.com/joemccann/dillinger/blob/b28fd80445ac02739548d99d79ea6490ac4c7d2d/plugins/core/server.js#L109

[ChihChengLiang]

Dear maintainers,

Thanks for this awesome project. Was googling for how to export slides to pdf and end up finding this discussion here. Would like a feature that can do this, but after went through some issue discussion here I understand lots of works are still going on. For anyone want to export slides to pdf, here I offer a workaround for you.

1. Modify the url by appending ?print-pdf after it. For example, change from https://hackmd.io/p/slide-example#/ to https://hackmd.io/p/slide-example?print-pdf. Note that ?print-pdf must be put before #/

2. Select print in the right-click menu. If you only intend to send it as pdf, check the background graphics option and you are in business.

3. If you want to print it and find a dark background too ink costly, you might want to uncheck the background graphics and use a black font color. Open your browser developer console and enter the following command $("h1, h2, p").css("color", "black"), then you are good to print. For example, in Chrome browser and Mac OS you press opt + cmd +j to open the developer console and paste the magic spell.

Cheers,
Chih-Cheng

[tigercosmos]

Shall we work on this to land the function to export PDF?