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Contributing

The print-css.rocks project is an open platform for spreading the word about "CSS Paged Media" and "Print CSS". Feel to contribute further lessons and showcases, pointers to documentation and resource etc. You can either contact me directly or you fork the project on Github and see me some pull requests. print-css.rocks is supposed to be a living and growing project for the Print CSS community.

Setting up your own environment

You need a decent Python 3 installation (Python 3.10 or higher) for installing the print-css.rocks setup locally. It might be necessary to installed the libxml2 and libxslt packages on Linux (including their dev packages) or using Homebrew on MacOSX.

> python3 --version
  Python 3.10.8

Clone the print-css-rocks repository:

> git clone git@github.com:zopyx/print-css-rocks.git

Install the local webservice:

> cd web
> python3 -m venv .
> source bin/activate
> pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run the web service on http://localhost:8000.

The environment variable LESSONS_DIR must point to the root of the lessons directory of your checkout.

> export LESSON_DIR=../lessons  # or
> export LESSON_DIR=/path/to/print-css-rocks/lessons
> bin/python server.py
> # or run "make serve"

Now you can access the web service aka your local print-css-rocks copy on http://localhost:8000.

Creating your own lessons

All lessons are located inside the lessons subfolder and must start with the prefix lesson-. For an example check out lesson-basic. The example HTML content must be placed inside the index.html file and the styles must be stored in styles.css. A lesson must also contain a file README.rst which contains a textual description of the lesson. The format of the file is Restructured Text (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html).

The lesson must contain a Makefile which usually references a generic Makefile on the lessons folder. It usually contains only the following line:

include ../Makefile

The manually checked conversion results are stored in the conversion.ini file which contains for each supported converter a dedicated section like

[common]
category = intro
title = Lesson on ....

[PDFreactor]
status = OK
pdf = pdfreactor.pdf
message =

[PrinceXML]
status = OK
pdf = prince.pdf
message =

[Antennahouse]
status = OK
pdf = antennahouse.pdf
message =

The section keys

  • PDFreactor
  • PrinceXML
  • Antennahouse
  • PagedJS
  • Typeset.sh
  • WeasyPrint
  • Vivliostyle
  • BFO

are case-sensitive. The status option is usually OK, ERROR or UNSUPPORTED by definition. However the value can be an arbitrary string. The values for pdf should remain untouched. In case of an error you may add a custom message option. The message option - even if empty - is mandatory.

The common section defines some some general metadata like the category (for grouping the lessons). category can be either basic, advanced or special (e.g. for vendor-specific tests).

A new test must be added to the lessons/lessons.ini file which defines an overall ordering of the tests on the lessons overview page.

Generating lessons

For running the complete lessons suite you need all converters installed on your system. This means that run.sh (Antennahouse9, pdfreactor.py (PDFreactor) and prince (Prince) scripts and binaries must be installed and callable from the shell (adjust your $PATH accordingly).

Running make inside a lesson will execute the Makefile targets pdfreactor, prince and antennahouse which is equivalent to running the following manually on the console:

make pdfreactor
make prince
make antennahouse
make weasyprint
make pagedjs
make vivliostyle
make typeset.sh
make bfo

There is an additional Makefile target images which will convert all PDF files to PNG (for usage within the web application).

In order to run and generate all lessons you need to execute the following:

cd lessons
python3 generate_all.py

The generate_all.py script will iterate over all lessons-* lesson directories and generate all related outputs. The generated files (PDF, converted PNG) will be copied to lessons/generated. This folder is also automatically updated for git (git rm on generation start, git add on generation termination).