mkdocs-cm-page-to-pdf

CM MkDocs Plugins - MkDocs Page to PDF

An MkDocs plugin to generate a PDF file for each MkDocs page using pyppeteer (chrome headless) and add a download button.

This was forked from the great work done by https://github.com/brospars/mkdocs-page-pdf and changed to allow individual PDF export instead of excluding paths from export, due to the need to speed up the PDF generation process for a vast number of files and an issue with the glob pattern used for the exclude parameter, since the plugin implementation of PurePath.match doesn't match recursively so we have to specify all possible paths to exclude, significantly slowing down the process. Parsing the FrontMatter YAML to search for a specific key:value speeds the process immensely.

How to use

Install the package with pip:

pip install mkdocs-cm-page-to-pdf

Enable the plugin in your mkdocs.yml:

plugins:
  # - ...
    - mkdocs-cm-page-to-pdf # should be last

Options

To set different options use the following syntax.

plugins:
  # - ...
    - mkdocs-cm-page-to-pdf:
        # Options here

• disable (bool): Disable pdf rendering useful to quickly disable it without removing the plugin config. Defaults to False.
• disableOnServe (bool): Disable pdf rendering when using mkdocs serve. Defaults to False.

The following options are directly induced from pyppeteer options :

• scale (float): Scale of the webpage rendering, defaults to 1.0.
• displayHeaderFooter (bool): Display header and footer. Defaults to False.
• headerTemplate (str): HTML template for the print header. Should be valid HTML markup with following classes.
  • date: formatted print date
  • title: document title
  • url: document location
  • pageNumber: current page number
  • totalPages: total pages in the document
• footerTemplate (str): HTML template for the print footer. Should be valid HTML markup with the same classes as headerTemplate.
• printBackground (bool): Print background graphics. Defaults toFalse.
• landscape (bool): Paper orientation. Defaults to False.
• pageRanges (string): Paper ranges to print, e.g., '1-5,8,11-13'. Defaults to empty string, which means all pages.
• format (str): Paper format. Defaults to A4.
• margin (dict): Paper margins.
  • top (str): Top margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • right (str): Right margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • bottom (str): Bottom margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
  • left (str): Left margin, accepts values labeled with units, defaults to 20px.
• pageLoadOptions (dict): Page load options (see this).
  • timeout (int): Maximum time in milliseconds, defaults to 30000.
  • waitUntil (str): When to consider navigation succeeded, defaults to load.
• exclude (list) : List of glob pattern to exclude. Disregarded when include is set to True.
• include (bool) : Manually define files to export. Defaults to False.

If using the include option, insert a pdfexport: true key in the FrontMatter YAML of any Markdown file you wish to export to PDF. Example:

---

pdfexport: true
---

Troubleshooting

Running in a docker container (ci/cd)

Depending on what image you are using you may encounter some issue running pyppeteer : Browser closed unexpectedly.

This is due to some missing shared libraries used by Chrome Headless.

Related issue: https://github.com/pyppeteer/pyppeteer/issues/194

See this article and this guide

Slow build on serve

You can use disable or disableOnServe options to disable the pdf rendering (entirely or on serve) but you can also use the mkdocs serve --dirtyreload flag to only rebuild modified files on the fly.

Blank page at the end

Due to a chrome bug a blank page can appear at the end of the PDF you can remove it by adding the following to you extra.css :

body {
    contain: strict;
}

Special thanks

The original version of this plugin (here: https://github.com/brospars/mkdocs-page-pdf) was inspired by mkdocs-with-pdf and mkdocs-pdf-export-plugin but without using weasyprint and instead pyppeteer (chrome headless) to have a render closer to what you have in your chrome browser.