posted on Friday, July 15, 2005 3:12 PM
by
thomasswilliams
PDF from DOC, DOC from Wiki (or the long way to Documentation)
I love documentation about as much as the next person, or perhaps a litle bit less. I choose to use a wiki (the always-improving Flexwiki) for my documentation because I can easily edit it and also integrate it into my apps via a "help" pane and the wiki's "print" view. I do sacrifice some nice formatting (I've been using Word for years and know how to get the document looking just right), though, and my boss insists on documentation in Word or PDF format for saving to a file share.
So the route I take to get a PDF is:
- Open the wiki page's "print" page URL in Word.
- Adjust formatting minimally, and save as a Word document (*.DOC) on my local PC (not back into the wiki).
- Make sure the graphics are embedded into the Word document, not IMG links, by clicking on each image and pressing CTRL+SHIFT+F9.
- Convert the Word document to PDF (I use CIB PDF Plug-In for Word XP, free for non-commercial use, found via The Tensor).
- Smirk in satisfaction (this step is optional - you might prefer a victory dance).
I can't believe how a simple thing like converting a wiki entry - essentially a web page - to PDF could be so troublesome. While some wikis have PDF export built-in (e.g. tikiwiki), I think an export to at least RTF is worth implementing to help those with more "traditional" documentation needs.