Some time ago there was a question in the forum how to get a nice pdf output from an ikiwiki page. However there were no answers. So I put it on the todo list, because I think this would be a nice feature.

Note that for example dokuwiki has a nice plugin which converts the wiki page to latex and then to pdf and you can customize the latex-preamble.

I've actually written one, it's just not publicly released. You can check it out from the "experimental" branch of my ikiplugins githup repo. It's called "html2pdf" and it depends on the static version of wkhtmltopdf rather than requiring a whole LaTeX setup. It's only been used on Ubuntu, so I can't say what problems there might be on other setups, but it works for me. It's not properly documented; I'd appreciate some help with that. -- KathrynAndersen

kathryn: wkhtmltopdf is based on webkit (qtwebkit). it effectively does a sort-of "i am a browser, i am going to print this page for you, oh look, you don't actually have a screen, i'll just output the file conveniently for you" thing. as such, the dependencies are MASSIVE. i just tried installing wkhtmltopdf on a debian server: it required pulling in x11 libraries, font configs, QT5, libxml2, 30+ other dependencies, pulling in over ONE HUNDRED sub and sub-dependencies - the works. absolutely NO chance - whatsoever - that i am going to put a public-facing server at risk or waste resources with such a nightmare waiting to happen, particularly one that is activated by a web service. latex on the other hand, despite being likely much larger, i can tolerate. it has "class" and history, being developed in the 70s by donald knuth - i.e. it was not developed by apple (ripping off the KDE KHTMLPart team's work, years ago) and does not depend on a whole bunch of crap such as qt. qt is a GUI toolkit, what am i gonna do installing that on a server for god's sake?? tex. donald knuth. that's pedigree.

Thanks, I downloaded the git-repro and did sudo cp html2pdf.pm /usr/share/perl5/IkiWiki/Plugin/ then I added html2pdf to the addplugins line in my setup-file (mywiki.setup) as well a new line html2pdf_pages=>"/*",. Then I did sudo ikiwiki --setup mywiki.setup. However there is no button or something like that which let's me create the pdf's -- ?micheal

That is because they are created automatically as part of the page-build process. That's what the "html2pdf_pages" option is for: it defines which pages have PDFs generated from them. If a PDF is generated for page "foo", then the PDF itself will be in "foo/foo.pdf".

I also notice you didn't mention installing wkhtmltopdf - it won't create PDFs without that! -- KathrynAndersen

Yes, wkhtmltopdf is installed and works, however there are no pdf-files in my /var/www/myiki directory or in scrdir.

Have you tried running it with "verbose" turned on, and noting the output? That could give some clues. And no, the PDFs are not placed in the source dir, only in the destination dir. -- KathrynAndersen

Edit (17.02.2012): I have put an extended version of the question on webmasters.stackexchange: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/24905/run-external-application-on-markdown-source-in-ikiwiki , perhaps someone of the ikiwiki programmers is intersted in having this feature too...