WordPress Blog to PDF

If you’d like to turn your WordPress blog content into a printable PDF in newspaper format, there’s now a solution for you: Make PDF Newspaper by Martin Hawksey. It makes use of the FiveFilters.org PDF Newspaper source code.

Developing a plugin like this has been on my todo list for the FiveFilters.org project for a while now. To give a little background, one goal of the project is to encourage users to explore the world of non-corporate media, and to do that we’re developing tools and services to make content on the web a little more accessible. One area of development has been the PDF Newspaper project which can take feed or HTML input and turn it into a printable PDF in newspaper format. But while the service at FiveFilters.org has been up and running for over a year now, bloggers have not had a convenient way to generate and offer their content in PDF format directly from their blogs.

I’m happy to say that a few days ago Martin Hawksey got in touch to say he had integrated the FiveFilters.org source code into a WordPress plugin. Martin had previously released the Make Tabbloid plugin which did something similar using HP’s Tabbloid service (in fact, my own plan for the plugin was to build on Martin’s work). HP, however, pulled API access to the service earlier in the year without warning – breaking any application that depended on it (one risk of relying on closed, cloud-based services, but more on that in another post). The Newspaper PDF project was started to offer users a free software (open source) alternative to HP’s service, so I’m very happy that the work has now been extended to the WordPress platform. Thanks Martin!

For a full list of features and an example of the PDF output, please visit Make PDF Newspaper.

I tested the plugin on this site a little earlier, following the installation steps, and it worked without any problems. To see the output, you can view the generated PDF for this blog.