[question]: change base URL of links in PDFs

[whyboris]

Question?

Everything is working beautifully but because when generating the PDF the website2pdf utility is using the sitemap.xml it generates PDFs with links that look like localhost:1313/introduction rather than mywebsite.com/introduction 😅

Is there already something I can do to fix it, or this would require a new feature? 🙇

[jgazeau]

Hi @whyboris , Indeed, I guess that you are using website2pdf on a local Hugo deployment of your website (port 1313 😃 ). The fact is that if you are using relative links the browser will automatically append the host in front of it. Which leads to http://localhost:1313/introduction if you are in local. Unfortunately the library cannot change that, because puppeteer doesn't have that option yet (check this issue) and that hot changing the html is not the proper solution.

In your cases I see two solutions:

• you could change your website to set absolute links. With Hugo it could be made with a specific configuration for example. By default it would have relative links and with a website2pdf configuration it would have absolute links.
• you could generate pdfs from a deployed website that contains your appropriate links. For example using the --sitemapUrl option. (e.g. website2pdf --sitemapUrl "http://mywebsite.om" )

I'll close this issue for now but if chromium and puppeteer teams decide to add such an option I'll take that into consideration and reopen the current issue😉

[whyboris]

Thank you for the quick response 🙇

I tried this out and it works well-enough (added to the bottom of the baseof.html) 👍 :

    <script>

      const anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");

      for (let i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
        const old = anchors[i].href;
        const new_url = old.replace("http://localhost:1313/", "https://utilitarianism.net/");
        anchors[i].href = new_url;
      }

    </script>

I'll have to add some more code to avoid messing up all the footnote links, but I'm sure it will work out 💪