= Asciidoctor PDF: A native PDF converter for AsciiDoc Dan Allen ; Sarah White v1.5.0.alpha.12, 2016-08-05 // Settings: :compat-mode!: :experimental: :idprefix: :idseparator: - :icons: font ifdef::env-github,env-browser[:outfilesuffix: .adoc] :pagenums: //:pdf-page-size: [8.25in, 11.69in] //:pdf-page-size: A4 ifdef::env-browser[:toc: preamble] // Aliases: :project-name: Asciidoctor PDF :project-handle: asciidoctor-pdf // URIs: //ifdef::env-github[:relfileprefix: /blob/master/] :uri-project: https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf :uri-project-repo: {uri-project} :uri-project-issues: {uri-project-repo}/issues :uri-project-list: http://discuss.asciidoctor.org :uri-prawn: http://prawn.majesticseacreature.com :uri-rvm: http://rvm.io :uri-asciidoctor: http://asciidoctor.org _Lo and behold_, a native PDF converter for AsciiDoc built with {uri-asciidoctor}[Asciidoctor] and {uri-prawn}[Prawn]! + _No more middleman._ + _No more DocBook toolchain._ + It's AsciiDoc straight to PDF! [caption=Status] CAUTION: {project-name} is currently _alpha_ software. While the converter handles most AsciiDoc content, there's still work needed to fill in gaps where conversion is incomplete, incorrect or not implemented. See the milestone v1.5.0 in the {uri-project-issues}[issue tracker] for details. == Prawn, the majestic PDF generator {uri-project}[{project-name}] is made possible by an amazing Ruby gem named Prawn. And what a gem it is! {uri-prawn}[Prawn] is a nimble PDF writer for Ruby. More important, it's a hackable platform that offers both high level APIs for the most common needs and low level APIs for bending the document model to accommodate special circumstances. With Prawn, you can write text, draw lines and shapes and place images _anywhere_ on the page and add as much color as you like. In addition, it brings a fluent API and aggressive code re-use to the printable document space. Here's an example that demonstrates how to use Prawn to create a basic PDF document. .Create a basic PDF document using Prawn [source,ruby] ---- require 'prawn' Prawn::Document.generate 'output.pdf' do text 'Hello, PDF creation!' end ---- It's that easy. And that's just the beginning. Skip ahead to <> to start putting it use. Prawn is the _killer library_ for PDF generation we've needed to close this critical gap in Asciidoctor. It absolutely takes the pain out of creating printable documents. Picking up from there, {project-name} takes the pain out of creating PDF documents _from AsciiDoc_. == Features === Notable features * Direct AsciiDoc to PDF conversion * <> * PDF document outline (i.e., bookmarks) * Table of contents page(s) * Document metadata (title, authors, subject, keywords, etc) * Internal cross reference links * Syntax highlighting with CodeRay or Pygments * Page numbering * Customizable running content (header and footer) * “Keep together” blocks (i.e., page breaks avoided in certain block content) * Autofit verbatim blocks (as permitted by base_font_size_min setting) * Orphan section titles avoided * Table border settings honored * Font-based icons * Custom fonts === Missing features See <>. == Prerequisites All that's needed is Ruby (1.9.3 or above; 2.2.x recommended) and a few Ruby gems, which we explain how to install in the next section. To check if you have Ruby available, use the `ruby` command to query the version installed: $ ruby --version [WARNING] ==== Prawn 2.0.0 and above requires Ruby >= 2.0.0 at installation (though it still works with Ruby 1.9.3 once you get beyond installation). If you need to use Asciidoctor PDF with Ruby 1.9.3, you must first install Prawn 1.3.0 using: $ gem install prawn --version 1.3.0 You can then proceed with installation of Asciidoctor PDF. ==== === System encoding Asciidoctor assumes you're using UTF-8 encoding. To minimize encoding problems, make sure the default encoding of your system is set to UTF-8. If you're using a non-English Windows environment, the default encoding of your system may not be UTF-8. As a result, you may get an `Encoding::UndefinedConversionError` or other encoding issues when invoking Asciidoctor. To solve these problems, we recommend at least changing the active code page in your console to UTF-8. chcp 65001 Once you make this change, all your Unicode headaches will be behind you. == Getting started You can get {project-name} by <> or <>. === Install the published gem {project-name} is published as a pre-release on RubyGems.org. You can install the published gem using the following command: $ gem install asciidoctor-pdf --pre If you want to syntax highlight source listings, you'll also want to install CodeRay, Rouge or Pygments. Choose one (or more) of the following: .CodeRay $ gem install coderay .Rouge $ gem install rouge .Pygments $ gem install pygments.rb You then activate syntax highlighting for a given document by adding the `source-highlighter` attribute to the document header (CodeRay shown): [source,asciidoc] ---- :source-highlighter: coderay ---- Assuming all the required gems install properly, verify you can run the `asciidoctor-pdf` script: $ asciidoctor-pdf -v If you see the version of {project-name} printed, you're ready to use {project-name}. Let's grab an AsciiDoc document to distill and start putting {project-name} to use! === An example AsciiDoc document If you don't already have an AsciiDoc document, you can use the [file]_basic-example.adoc_ file found in the examples directory of this project. ifeval::[{safe-mode-level} >= 20] See <>. endif::[] ifeval::[{safe-mode-level} < 20] .basic-example.adoc [source,asciidoc] .... include::examples/basic-example.adoc[] .... endif::[] It's time to convert the AsciiDoc document directly to PDF. === Convert AsciiDoc to PDF IMPORTANT: You'll need the `rouge` gem installed to run this example since it uses the `source-highlighter` attribute with the value of `rouge`. Converting to PDF is a simple as running the `asciidoctor-pdf` script using Ruby and passing our AsciiDoc document as the first argument. $ asciidoctor-pdf basic-example.adoc This command is just a shorthand way of running: $ asciidoctor -r asciidoctor-pdf -b pdf basic-example.adoc The `asciidoctor-pdf` command just saves you from having to remember all those flags. That's why we created it. When the script completes, you should see the file [file]_basic-example.pdf_ in the same directory. Open the [file]_basic-example.pdf_ file with a PDF viewer to see the result. .Example PDF document rendered in a PDF viewer image::examples/example-pdf-screenshot.png[Screenshot of PDF document,width=800,scaledwidth=100%] You're also encouraged to try converting this <> as well as the documents in the examples directory to see more of what {project-name} can do. The pain of the DocBook toolchain should be melting away about now. == Themes The layout and styling of the PDF is driven by a YAML configuration file. To learn how the theming system works and how to create and apply custom themes, refer to the <>. You can use the built-in theme files, which you can find in the [file]_data/themes_ directory, as examples. == Font-based icons You can use icons in your PDF document using any of the following icon sets: * *fa* - https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/[Font Awesome^] (default) * *octicon* - https://octicons.github.com/[Octicons^] * *fi* - http://zurb.com/playground/foundation-icon-fonts-3[Foundation Icons^] * *pf* - http://paymentfont.io/[Payment font^] You can enable font-based icons by setting the following attribute in the header of your document: [source,asciidoc] ---- :icons: font ---- If you want to override the font set globally, also set the `icon-set` attribute: [source,asciidoc] ---- :icons: font :icon-set: pf ---- Here's an example that shows how to use the Amazon icon from the payment font (pf) icon set in a sentence: [source,asciidoc] ---- Available now at icon:amazon[]. ---- You can use the `set` attribute on the icon macro to override the icon set for a given icon. [source,asciidoc] ---- Available now at icon:amazon[set=pf]. ---- In addition to the sizes supported in the HTML backend (lg, 1x, 2x, etc), you can enter any relative value in the size attribute (e.g., 1.5em, 150%, etc). [source,asciidoc] ---- icon:android[size=40em] ---- You can enable use of fonts during PDF generation (instead of in the document header) by passing the `icons` attribute to the `asciidoctor-pdf` command. $ asciidoctor-pdf -a icons=font -a icon-set=octicon sample.adoc Icon-based fonts are handled by the `prawn-icon` gem. To find a complete list of available icons, consult the https://github.com/jessedoyle/prawn-icon/tree/master/data/fonts[prawn-icon] repository. == Image scaling Since PDF is a fixed-width canvas, you almost always need to specify an image width to get the image to fit properly on the page. There are four ways to specify the width of the image, listed here in order of precedence: [cols="1s,3d"] |=== |Attribute{nbsp}Name | Description |pdfwidth |The display width of the image as an absolute size (e.g., 2in), percentage of the content width (e.g., 75%), or percentage of the page width (e.g., 100vw). _Intended to be used for the PDF converter only._ |scaledwidth |The display width of the image as a percentage of the content width (e.g., 75%). _Intended to be used for print output such as PDF._ |width |The unitless display width of the image (assumed to be pixels), typically matching the intrinsic width of the image. If the width exceeds the content width, the image is scaled down to the content width. |_unspecified_ |If you don't specify one of the width attributes, the intrinsic width of the image is used (the px value is multiplied by 75% to convert to pt) unless the width exceeds the content width, in which case the image is scaled down to the content width. |=== The sizing is always controlled by the width (explicit or intrinsic) and the size of the image is scaled proporationally. The height of the image is ignored by the PDF converter, with one exception. If the height of the image exceeds the height of the page, the image is scaled down to fit on a single page. === pdfwidth attribute The pdfwidth attribute is the recommended way to set the image size for the PDF output. This attribute is provided for two reasons. First, the fixed-width canvas often calls for a width that is distinct from other output formats, such as HTML. Second, this attribute allows the width to be expressed using a variety of units. The pdfwidth attribute supports the following units: * pt (default) * in * mm * cm * px * % (percentage of content width) * vw (percentage of page width) In all cases, the width is converted to pt. == Optional scripts {project-name} also provides a shell script that invokes GhostScript (`gs`) to optimize and compress the generated PDF with minimal impact on quality. You must have Ghostscript installed to use it. Here's an example usage: $ ./bin/optimize-pdf basic-example.pdf The command will generate the file [file]_example-optimized.pdf_ in the current directory. WARNING: The `optimize-pdf` script currently requires a Bash shell (Linux, OSX, etc). We plan to rewrite the script in Ruby so it works across platforms (see https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf/issues/1[issue #1]) IMPORTANT: The `optimize-pdf` script relies on Ghostscript >= 9.10. Otherwise, it may actually make the PDF larger. Also, you should only consider using it if the file size of the original PDF is > 5MB. If a file is found with the extension `.pdfmarks` and the same rootname as the input file, it is used to add metadata to the generated PDF document. This file is necessary to preserve the document metadata since Ghostscript will otherwise drop it. That's why {project-name} always creates this file in addition to the PDF. == Contributing In the spirit of free software, _everyone_ is encouraged to help improve this project. To contribute code, simply fork the project on GitHub, hack away and send a pull request with your proposed changes. Feel free to use the {uri-project-issues}[issue tracker] or {uri-project-list}[Asciidoctor mailing list] to provide feedback or suggestions in other ways. == Development To help develop {project-name}, or to simply use the development version, you need to get the source from GitHub. Follow the instructions below to learn how to clone the source and run it from your local copy. === Retrieve the source code You can retrieve the source of {project-name} in one of two ways: . Clone the git repository . Download a zip archive of the repository ==== Option 1: Fetch using git clone If you want to clone the git repository, simply copy the {uri-project-repo}[GitHub repository URL] and pass it to the `git clone` command: $ git clone https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf Next, change to the project directory: $ cd asciidoctor-pdf ==== Option 2: Download the archive If you want to download a zip archive, click the btn:[Download Zip] button on the right-hand side of the repository page on GitHub. Once the download finishes, extract the archive, open a console and change to that directory. TIP: Instead of working out of the {project-handle} directory, you can simply add the absolute path of the [path]_bin_ directory to your `PATH` environment variable. We'll leverage the project configuration to install the necessary dependencies. === Install dependencies If you're using {uri-rvm}[RVM], we recommend creating a new gemset to work with {project-name}: $ rvm use 2.2@asciidoctor-pdf --create We like RVM because it keeps the dependencies required by various projects isolated. The dependencies needed to use {project-name} are defined in the [file]_Gemfile_ at the root of the project. We can use Bundler to install the dependencies for us. To check you have Bundler available, use the `bundle` command to query the installed version: $ bundle --version If it's not installed, use the `gem` command to install it. $ gem install bundler Then use the `bundle` command to install the project dependencies: $ bundle NOTE: You need to call `bundle` from the project directory so that it can find the [file]_Gemfile_. Assuming all the required gems install properly, verify you can run the `asciidoctor-pdf` script using Ruby: $ ruby ./bin/asciidoctor-pdf -v or $ bundle exec ./bin/asciidoctor-pdf -v If you see the version of {project-name} printed, you're ready to use {project-name}! CAUTION: If you get an error message--and you're not using a Ruby manager like RVM--you may need to invoke the script through `bundle exec`: For best results, be sure to always use `bundle exec` whenever invoking the `./bin/asciidoctor-pdf` script in development mode. [[resources,Links]] == Resources * https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/prawn-ruby/MbMsCx862iY/6ImCsvLGfVcJ[Discussion about image quality in PDFs] == Authors {project-name} was written by https://github.com/mojavelinux[Dan Allen] and https://github.com/graphitefriction[Sarah White] of OpenDevise Inc. on behalf of the Asciidoctor Project. == Copyright Copyright (C) 2014-2016 OpenDevise Inc. and the Asciidoctor Project. Free use of this software is granted under the terms of the MIT License. For the full text of the license, see the <> file. Refer to the <> file for information about third-party Open Source software in use.