bespoke-to-pdf

Generate a PDF file from your bespoke presentation

Requirements

• Presentation must be using bespoke-hash
  • Unless using a custom app

Usage

Command line

$ npm -g install bespoke-to-pdf
$ bespoke-to-pdf http://localhost:8080 30 > ./out.pdf

Inputs

Simply provide the URL of the presentation, and the amount of slides in the presentation.

bespoke-to-pdf [presentation-url] [slide-count]
bespoke-to-pdf [slide-count] [presentation-url]

Programmatic

$ npm install --save bespoke-to-pdf

var toPdf = require('bespoke-to-pdf');
var fs = require('fs');
var pdfStream = toPdf('http://localhost:8080', 30);

pdfStream.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('./out.pdf'));

The bespoke-to-pdf module returns a function, which takes a presentation url and slide count and returns a PDF stream.

toPdf(presentationUrl<String>, slideCount<Number>, opts<Object>) => Stream

Options

The exported function can be passed a third options parameter to tweak positional, dimensional and time flow settings.

Listed values are defaults

{

  width: 1024 * 1.5,  //width of browser instance
  height: 682 * 1.5,  //height of browser instance
  delay: 5000, // (milliseconds) delay from page load to first capture
  orientation: 'landscape', // PDF paper layout portrait or landscape 
  paperSize: 'A4',  // PDF paper size, accepts common US and GB sizes or an array tuple consisting of [width, height]
  app: undefined, //path to nw.js app, which is passed to nw-shot dependency
  slide: {
    left: 14.5, //left position of the slide in the PDF page
    top: 22, // top position of the slide in the PDF page
    width: 813, // width of the slide in the PDF page
    height: undefined, //height of the slide in the PDF page
    fit: undefined, // Array tuple consisting of [width, height]
                    // fit overrides width and height, causes image
                    // to fit into supplied bounds
    scale: 1, // scale image by amount
    delay: 1000 // delay between slides
  }
}

To pass top level options via the command line simply use their names as flags, e.g.

$ bespoke-to-pdf --delay 1000 http://localhost:8080 30 > ./out.pdf

Access sub level options using a hyphen:

$ bespoke-to-pdf --slide-scale 2 http://localhost:8080 30 > ./out.pdf

Supply command line objects or arrays as JSON, make sure to quote it so spaces don't cause unintended parsing:

$ bespoke-to-pdf --slide-fit "[100, 100]" http://localhost:8080 30 > ./out.pdf

Example

$ bespoke-to-pdf http://davidmarkclements.github.io/10-tips/ 71 > 10-tips.pdf

This will generate a PDF from a remote bespoke presentation, depending on connection and CPU speed the delay may have to be adjusted slightly. Locally hosted presentations that don't use on-load fade-ins are perfectly suited to a lower delay.

Getting a Visual

Set an environment variable NWSHOT_SHOW to 1 to unhide the NW.js browser window taking snapshots.

$ NWSHOT_SHOW=1 bespoke-to-pdf http://localhost:8080 30 > ./out.pdf

Running on a Server

NW.js requires an X server to run, currently there is no headless offering. Until that happens see this comment in NW.js issue 769 for a starting place to create a server environment that will run NW.js without requiring a physical display.

How

bespoke-to-pdf uses a hidden NW.js browser to load the presentation, then uses the Window.capturePage to capture an image of the current slide, moving through the slides by incrementing location.hash. Each captured image is appended to a PDFDocument stream as provided by pdfkit.

License

MIT License

Sponsorship

Sponsored by nearForm