PDF Export of Wikis

1 Requirements

Currently, the ILIAS wiki is fine for working collaboratively and leaving mostly great pages and their contents in the format of an ILIAS Wiki. However, there are many use cases that require "exporting" or printing several wiki pages or even an entire wiki, either on paper or as a nice looking (!) PDF File.
 
In our humble opinion, we need two basic improvements to the Wiki (and perhaps the learning module as well) printing funtionality:

1. Manual sorting and selection of wikipages to be printed:

Currently, if you want to print a wiki or single wiki-pages, they are sorted alphabetically.
It would be great if the pages could be individually sorted (e.g. like course material) so that you can print the wiki in a way that makes sense for your intended purpose.

2. Proper PDF Generation / Export

Right now, the only chance to coax the wiki contents into the format of a PDF File is either using a PDF printer / writer and the built-in browser printing funktionality or getting hld of the "print-HTML"-page and working some magic on it with Adobe Acrobat.
While the PDF quality of a browser printout is very poor (page breaks, footer/header of pages with url, positioning of images, etc...) is poor, the page structure of the wiki is not exported at all, since all contents lands on one single page.
 
Thus, the wiki / learning module PDF printout function should generate (!) a multi-page pdf (with manualy page sorting, see above :)) using the java server.

1.1 Known Issues (as of Feb 2014)

The current implementation uses the new PDF generation component in ILIAS. Due to its server side processing latex formulas using MathJax are currently not rendered correctly. Additionally the component still suffers from a proper handling of image sizes.

2 Status

• Scheduled for: Release 5.0 (will be set by Jour Fixe)
• Funding: Funded by Universität Freiburg
• Maintainer: Alex Killing
  
• Implementation of the feature is done by Leifos
  
• Contract settled: Not Yet
  
• Tested by / status: (name, e-mail), (status information set after implementation)

3 Additional Information

Contact the following persons if you want to know more about this feature, its implementation or funding:

• Information about concept: Barbara Müller (barbara.mueller@rz.uni-freiburg.de), Marko Glaubitz (marko.glaubitz@rz.uni-freiburg.de)
• Information about funding: see above
  
• Information about implementation: (name, e-mail)

4 Discussion

Alex, 7.11.2013: I would very much support to provide PDF generation of all content objects. Databay is currently revising the service from the Java server based implementation to using TCPDF, see Improving PDF Generation. This new service should be used.

Marko Glaubitz, 08.11.2013: Regarding the sorting: The main page of the wiki should be put at the top of the list by default. If sorting turns out to be kind of a hassle beginning a new page in the PDF file for every seperate page in the wiki will make page (block) sorting in the local post-production of  the PDF more convenient.

JF 11.11.2013: We appreciate the feature and schedule it for 4.5. The new PDF service should be used, and each wiki page should start with a page break. The sorting should be done on a separate page.

5 Implementation

JL 13 Nov 2014: This feature has been implemented for 5.0/trunk.