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eecs485staff / primer-spec

A Jekyll theme for sites with content-heavy pages
https://eecs485staff.github.io/primer-spec/
MIT License
22 stars 12 forks source link

[PDF] Automatic PDF Generation #225

Closed seshrs closed 1 year ago

seshrs commented 1 year ago

Context

Closes #136! šŸš€ As mentioned in #136, I've seen Piazza questions with students asking how to download the spec as a PDF (either because they don't know about print-to-PDF, or because they assume that the PDF won't look good). Hence, let's make the PDF version of the page easily available!

This turned out to be a complex feature, and was only recently made possible by GitHub Pages + GitHub Actions + GitHub Support.

NOTE: "Download as PDF" feature only works when site is built with build-primer-spec-action

If you're a course instructor, and your course website does not yet use build-primer-spec-action, your website's pages will not show the "Download as PDF" button.

Follow the instructions in that action's README to set up GitHub Pages deployment via the action!

Validation

Visit one of the pages in the PR preview website. If you click the "download" button, your browser will download the PDF version of the page! Example page: https://preview.sesh.rs/previews/eecs485staff/primer-spec/225/docs/USAGE_ADVANCED.html

Screen Shot 2022-11-28 at 11 20 46 PM

Known issue: Some of the pages are not rendered correctly. I'm pretty sure this is related to my repo setup and will not happen on real spec websites, but I'll need to keep an eye out for this after this PR merges.

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

Thanks for opening this pull request! šŸ™

I've changed this PR's base branch to develop. A maintainer will review your PR soon!

github-actions[bot] commented 1 year ago

The spec from this PR is available at https://preview.sesh.rs/previews/eecs485staff/primer-spec/225/.

(Available until Thu Jan 19 2023.)

seshrs commented 1 year ago

Ugh, we have a circular dependency between PDF-generation and PR preview uploads ā€” the PDF generation step requires that the CSS assets be available at the PR Preview URL šŸ˜–

The issue is transient, only affects this repo (Primer Spec aka me), and will fix itself when the PR Preview action re-runs. I'm not going to fix this for now, but will track this in #226.

EDIT 1: Oops, this is a bit more complicated, there's some other issue that's causing the generated PDFs to be blank pages.

EDIT 2: Figured it out, it was a CORS issue.

By default, Same Origin Policy (SOP) applies, preventing resources from preview.sesh.rs from being accessed by other websites.

I updated the Primer Spec Preview server to add a header allowing all CORS origins to access files in the preview directory (seshrs/primer-spec-preview@63b41b03051935f490465fc57c3b22f3c5df27a3). Now, when GitHub Actions runs Chromedriver to generate the PDFs, the JS from the preview website loads correctly!

(CC @awdeorio, you might find this interesting. Maybe this might make for an interesting addition to the HTTP lecture?)

EDIT 3: Ugh, looks like some pages generate PDFs correctly and some don't. I wonder why it's non-deterministic...