Hello everyone.  I went to the user guide section and ultimately printed out everything there which took some time and left me with about a 500 page manual it seems.

Ive never been a fan of the trend of online documentation and foregoing portable formats such as .pdf, .doc and so forth.  I just dont like having to read a web page at the same time Im trying to learn about something like CI.  At any rate, with that said, is there a .pdf version of the user guide?  Something I can download and save to a memory stick or do a double sided print out of?  Thanks.

Sounds like a fun project actually.

Derek,
Does EllisLabs have any issues with someone screen-scraping the User Guide for this effort? Shouldn’t be difficult at all to screen-scrape and dynamically generate a PDF.

Thats what I was thinking.  Ive done that before for my own personal use, but I wouldnt do it and post it up somewhere without an okay to do so.

It wont be difficult, but it will take some time, but I dont mind giving it a stab.

As long as you’re using the manual for CodeIgniter support, we have absolutely no issues with converting it into PDF.  Go nuts!  And feel free to make it available to the community.  One thing to keep in mind though is that with each new release of CI the userguide may change.  This is almost always corrections or typo fixes, or to document new functions… nothing major - but it would involve going back through the process again at a later date.

Understood.  But not having to flip between webpages or wikis would be worth it to me anyway.

I can only imagine being in a classroom today and the students having to click through web pages as the instructor goes through the material as opposed to having a book and being able to at least book mark pages.  Call me old fashioned but I like being able to scribble in the margins and take notes and so forth...LOL

I dont know how long it will take, but I’ll give it a try and post it up once I have it done.

I was just going to write a Ruby script to knock it out real quick… run it each time there is an update to the documentation and bam - brand new PDF.

Well that would save a ton of labor.  Geesh I need to learn some of these programming scripts.

walesmd, so long as you are doing this on the copy of the user guide on your own installation, it’s no problem.  I think our server admin would frown on scraping from CodeIgniter.com though.

Yeah - I didn’t even think of using my own local copy. That’s probably the route that will be taken.

walesmd, just checking, but are you going to try and use your process to create a .pdf?  If not, I can go through and start doing so manually.  Just asking because there’s no need in duplicating the work, plus if you can create a script that easily you’d be sitting back relaxing having a drink or something before I finished the first page.

Nah - go ahead and go for it. Or make it a learning experience - Ruby is insanely easy to learn and the hrpicot gem will make processing the information a breeze.

Im in the process of trying to learn some ruby.  It does seem rather easy, and that coming from someone that doesnt know any programming languages.

I have ruby installed (obviously) and Hpricot downloaded and extracted.  However, Im not sure how to use Hpricot.  Any pointers or ideas there?

I’ll keep reading though, Im also going through some of the basic tutorials for ruby but Im still on the basic stuff, puts, gets, chomp, strings and so forth.

Bored and practicing my regex-fu:

http://www.eidolongroup.com/_WikiFiles/codeigniter.html

Here’s a link to a single-page, self-updating (within limits) version of the CodeIgniter documentation. It’s in HTML format, but could easily be run through some sort of PDF transform.

It’s done with PHP, CURL, and cron—it’ll run weekly against the REAL CI userguide, and as long as the table of contents doesn’t change, it’ll continue to pick up all the docs.

Caveat: i *know* some of the internal links don’t work. My regex-fu is not at blackbelt level by any means, and the way pages link to other pages within the docs is inconsistent. Most of them work, though, having been transformed into #anchor links from their original /page links.

--Adrienne

Thats awesome and that could easily be converted to pdf.  WOW.  Well, if nothing else, I’ll be learning ruby.  I didnt realize it was that easy to learn, so now if I can just get good at it, LOL.

Download CutePDF and print to it - bam, instant PDF version.

Derek—whoops. If you prefer I can make it so my script scrapes a local install instead of CodeIgniter.com, though it’s literally only going to do so once a week, via cron.

I wanted to do it from CI.com rather than a local install because my local install might not GET updated right away, and i wanted this to be current for people. But if you would prefer, i can go ahead and switch it over—it’s just a grep on some URLs.

Adrienne