Feature: Download Slide as PDF

[swashata]

While discussing at WordCamp Ahmedabad today, we came up with an idea that perhaps we can have a button on the main page of the slide which would download a PDF format of the document.

I think this is very much doable and would solve the offline issue. There are three approaches that come to mind.

Manual PDF Linking

Here, author of the repo/slide would create a PDF by simply taking a Print (Save as PDF) and having the button link to the PDF.

pros

• Not much to develop here.
• Will always work and the PDF will be the same, regardless of the browser.

cons

• Overhead of managing the PDF along with HTML.

Automated PDF generation with JS

We can use an Open Source MIT licensed JS library jsPDF to automate the process without needing a server.

pros

• No extra burden on maintainer.
• Should work on almost all browsers.

cons

• Things are a bit experimental. So could be janky.
• Would work only on the slides page, not on any other page (maybe).

Build time PDF generation

I don't know here how exactly the docs would find their way to publication/website. But there has to be a build process and I believe it would be powered by node.

So if we have something to work with right now, I think it would be best for me to try and integrate the PDF generation during the build time.

pros

• Generated automatically during build time with headless chrome. So very consistent.
• Not at all heavy on browsers because it will be afterall another static file.
• Maintainers won't have to think about it because it would happen everytime the site is built.

cons

• Maybe we will need to add/edit existing tooling as mentioned here

[JulieKuehl]

Downloading as a PDF can also be done through the regular print feature of most operating systems.

[swashata]

Yes and we can also have a button to invoke the print command, which is the easiest to implement.

[JulieKuehl]

Just be aware that on the learn.wordpress.org site we are very limited as to what scripts can be run there. We'll have to work with the Meta team on this.