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 of vivliostyle is impressive, but does not support hyphenation... yet. For details, see the great site http://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

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 and run the PDFreactor web service

The PDFreactor web service is required to be running even when using PDFreactor on the command line.

Download the PDFreactor archive from http://www.pdfreactor.com/download/ and extract it on the local system. The directory PDFreactor should be created.
Change to the PDFreactor/bin/ directory
Run ./pdfreactorwebservice start
Check if the web service is running with ./pdfreactorwebservice status
The web service will start accepting requests a few seconds later. Until then, you may see: <urlopen error [Errno 111] Connection refused> when attempting to use it.

Running PDFreactor from the command line

The syntax to create PDF files using the command line is:

./pdfreactor.py -i input.html -o output.pdf

Important: the CSS file needs to be in the same directory 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.

If you wish to use JavaScript linked from your source HTML, such as awesomizr.js for Table of Contents generation, this mode is disabled by default. You can enable it with:

./pdfreactor.py --javaScriptMode ENABLED -i input.html -o output.pdf

PHP wrapper script