This tutorial describes how to write your views for help pages using Markdown syntax to be able to generate PDFs from same source files.

View renderer ¶

Create the file components/MdViewRenderer.php with following contents:

<?php
class MdViewRenderer extends CViewRenderer
{
    public $fileExtension='.md';

    protected function generateViewFile($sourceFile,$viewFile) {
        $md=new CMarkdown;
        $input = file_get_contents($sourceFile);
        $output = $md->transform($input);
        file_put_contents($viewFile,$output);
    }

}

Add it to the application config in config/main.php:

'components' => array(
        'viewRenderer' => array(
            'class'=>'MdViewRenderer',
        ),
        // .... other components config
    ),

Help pages ¶

Create some help pages in the views/site/help directory as files with the .md extension. Your favourite text editor should enable syntax higlight in them.

Add a view action in your SiteController:

public function actions()
    {
        return array(
            'help'=>array(
                'class'=>'CViewAction',
                'basePath'=>'help',
            ),
            // .... other actions
        );
    }

Now just link the pages in your main menu:

'url' => array('/site/help', 'view'=>'sales'),

Generating PDF ¶

Markdown files can be converted to PDF using pandoc, a swiss-army knife written in Haskell for converting documents between various formats. It uses

Assuming all images in the .md files start with /images we need to add a proper relative path for pandoc to find those files. So let's prepend ../../.. to them using sed:

TMPDIR=/tmp
for m in `ls *.md`; do
   sed 's/^!\[\(.*\)\](\(.*\))$/![\1](..\/..\/..\/..\2)/g' $m > ${TMPDIR}/$m;
done

Modified files are put into a temporary directory to avoid breaking them for HTML.

Generate a PDF using pandoc: ~~~ TMPDIR=/tmp pandoc -S -N -Vlang=polish --latex-engine=xelatex ${TMPDIR}/*.md -o test.pdf ~~~

Instead of using a wildcard (*) specify all files manually to force order in which pandoc concatenates them.