PDF Creation Station Tool Help
PDF Creation Station can create PDF files from any combination of posts and pages from this page.
for more information, visit KalinBooks.com/pdf-creation-station
If you are looking for the settings page to set up PDF creation for individual pages and posts, you can find it under the settings menu to the left.
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Select Pages and Posts:
In this top panel you should see a list of every post and page in your website. Click the green Add buttons to add each page or post to your document draft. You can click the column headers to reorder or type in one of the four textfields to filter the individual columns to find just the items you need. Also note the pagination buttons at the bottom.
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My Document:
The list of your selected pages and posts will appear here. This is the order they will appear in the final document. Click and drag to reorder them.
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Insert HTML:
You may customize many aspects of the generated PDF files by inserting text or HTML snippets into the first six text fields on this page. The HTML will be rendered and saved into the PDF file. If you do not know HTML, you can simply leave the default HTML as is, which will give you a standard title header with the post title, author, date and link as well as basic Title and Final pages.
A list of allowable HTML tags can be found in the Shortcodes section below.
If you do not want a Title or Final page, you may leave those fields blank and the page will not be created. If you would like a blank Title or Final page, enter
.
Note: Please use double quotes (") in HTML attributes such as font size or href, due to a bug with single quotes.
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Create Files:
- Header Title and Header Sub Title:
This is the text that will display as the header at the top of every page within your generated PDF files. Blog shortcodes (explained below) are allowed here, but due to PDF generation limitations, page/post shortcodes as well as HTML markup are not allowed.
- Include Images:
You can choose whether or not to include images in the PDF. This is turned off by default because there are bugs with displaying images. If you turn this on, be sure to check that your images are displayed properly. Depending on the quantity and size of your images, this may cause the PDF generation to take a lot longer. PDF generation is highly processor intensive and in some cases, with extremely large and complex PDF files, the server will simply give up.
- Content Font Size:
Set the font size for the main content of the PDF files. You MUST enter a number into this field. You may use font tags to override this in inserted HTML.
- Run other plugin shortcodes:
Select whether or not you want other plugins to run their shortcode functions on the content before PDF generation. If not selected, shortcodes will be removed from the content. This feature may be hit or miss, as there's lots of crazy things a plugin shortcode might try to do. If you find a plugin that doesn't work for you, please let me know.
- and plugin filters:
Select whether or not you want other plugins to be able to filter the post content. This also can be hit or miss and if a specific plugin won't work for you, let me know and I might be able to fix it.
- Convert videos to links:
Select to convert any YouTube, Vimeo or Ted Talk videos in your pages/posts into a link to the correct page, since we can't embed a video in the PDF. If not selected, videos will be removed. If anyone knows how to extract a correct page url from a Hulu embed code or video ID, please let me know so I can get this to work for Hulu as well. If you have another video provider for which you'd like to see this working, please let me know.
- File Name:
Enter the file name for the PDF you are about to create. Blog-level shortcodes will work. You can also select to build one or more of filetypes: .PDF, .HTML or .TXT.
- Automatic page breaks:
Un-check if you don't want page breaks between each post.
- Include Table of Contents:
Checking this will create a new page after your title page and generate a Table of Contents with links. WARNING: just like 'include images', checking this can cause the PDF generation to take a bit longer.
- Create Documents!:
Click this button when you are ready to create your PDF (HTML or TXT) file. This will generate one to three files of the filetypes you chose and the new files will appear in the Existing Files section below.
- Reset Defaults:
Reset all your form values back to the originals that shipped with the plugin. This will not change or delete any existing PDF files.
- Save as Template:
Here you enter a name for the document template you are creating and hit Save as Template to add your current setup to your list of templates to be reused at a later date.
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Existing Files:
In this section will appear the list of any PDF, HTML or TXT files you have created. Like the page/post section, this section has filter, sorting and pagination abilities to help you find your files.
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Saved Document Templates:
In this section will appear the list of saved document templates. This allows you to save a working draft of a document for later use. To save a draft to this section, go up to the Create Files section and save your work using the textfield and "Save as Template" button near the bottom of the section. To use a template, find it in the table and click its corresponding Load button. Then you can edit the settings and/or create your documents.
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Shortcodes:
Shortcodes are snippets of text starting with "[" and ending with "]" that will be automatically replaced with the appropriate information. You may insert these codes into any fields on this page to be replaced with information like blog name, post title, author, date, etc.
The date/time shortcodes all have an optional format parameter allowing you to format the date/time very specifically using tokens such as: m=month, M=text month, F=full text month, d=day, D=short text Day Y=4 digit year, y=2 digit year, H=hour, i=minute, s=seconds. For a full list of options look at the format parameters section of this page: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php.
Note: these shortcodes are not entered into the main WordPress shortcode system, so they will only work within the PDF Creation Station plugin.
Advanced Help
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GitHub Repository
To watch Kalin's progress or download a beta version, go to the PDF Creation Station GitHub repository.
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Plugin efficiency and clean up procedure
If you are not using the settings page that applies PDF links on individual pages and posts, you may want to deactivate this plugin after you have built all your PDF files. Doing this will give you a slight overall blog performance increase (due to WordPress' architecture, all plugins slow your blog down at least a little even if they aren't doing anything). However, if you want to retain your settings for next time you reactivate, go into the settings page (in the settings menu to the left) and scroll to the bottom to find the checkbox labeled "Upon plugin deactivation clean up all database entries". Un-check it, scroll back up and hit save.
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File Locations
PDF files are saved into the uploads directory in the kalins-pdf folder. You will need to delete this directory manually if you wish to remove it. To change this directory, refer to this blog post. (Requires a little PHP hacking.)
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wp-config in non-standard location?
Refer to this blog post if your wp-config.php is in a non-standard location.
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Foreign Characters? Want to change a font?
Refer to this blog post if you are having problems with foreign characters or otherwise wish to change the default font of the generated PDF files.
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Customize/translate the word 'page'
Refer to this blog post if you would like to translate or change the word 'page' which appears at the bottom of every page before the page numbers.