Show HN: GitPrint.com – A site to easily print Markdown files on GitHub

https://gitprint.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/README.md

by flog • 12 years ago

68 44 12 years ago

flog9• 12 years ago

Hi everyone - I'm the author of this post/site. This is last weekend's project.

I got frustrated with not having a good way to print Markdown files from GitHub (root level repo READMEs and individual .md/mdown files).

It's super simple to use: just replace 'github.com' with 'gitprint.com' (when on a GitHub markdown file page) and it will convert it to a beautiful print-friendly PDF and prompt you to print.

Any feedback would be appreciated. (It's just a fun side project, but would like to improve it as I think it could be useful for like-minded people)

alexbilbie• 12 years ago

Great service, thank you! I've already used it to print out https://gitprint.com/hueniverse/hawk

jredburn• 12 years ago

This is great. Would happily pay a few $$$ to be able to use on private repositories.

flog9• 12 years ago

I haven't looked into private repos yet, but good idea: will add it to the todo list.

dfc5• 12 years ago

What is doing the typesetting? I do not recognize:

   Producer: Qt 4.8.4 (C) 2011 Nokia Corporation and/or its subsidiary(-ies)

Why didn't you use pandoc+latex:

  $ pandoc -s -S -o gitprint.pdf FILE.md

616c3• 12 years ago

As a fun exercise, you should checkout the Gitit README[0], which is a cool VCS-managed wiki that renders everything via Pandoc, using this Gitprint service. Or not. I see you or someone else constantly retorting with "Why not Pandoc?" and I agree with you. I started to get interest in Haskell again just because Pandoc, and Gitit, and some other very impressive stuff, is written in Haskell and seems to do some stuff very powerfully.

However, a caveat. It is not mentioned in the documentation, but Gitit does not enable PDF export by default, when Pandoc is more than capable of doing so? Why? Because, in all fairness, it can add significant load. According to the conf file comments.

pdf-export: yes
# if yes, PDF will appear in export options. PDF will be created using
# pdflatex, which must be installed and in the path. Note that PDF
# exports create significant additional server load.

How much load, I am not sure. I would love to see a similar Happstack app like this program that runs gitit or the new fork gitit2, rewritten for Happstack updates now that the API has matured. This makes me think performance is an issue.

As an aside, I know ShareLatex opened up their code. I have not had time to check, but I was curious if they do use standard Latex for generating files and if they do, how they make it performant (I know they have a couple layers, I watched their old Node/JS London talk, I mean hear Latex in particular) so fast for potentially thousands of people at once.

[0] https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown

oneeyedpigeon• 12 years ago

Could you not have posted a link to the main home page for gitprint, rather than direct to a URL that invokes a print dialog? That's pretty nasty.

(Aprt from that, though, this looks like a handy service :))

flog9• 12 years ago

Yeah, I know. I did think about that too, but decided seeing it in action was the best way to express it's intent. I might update the submission title to warn people though.

bowerbird2• 12 years ago

that link is a _very_ bad idea. awful.

and i'm the person who told you last week that this service is a good idea. it is.

so change the link.

-bowerbird

hodgesmr• 12 years ago

Awesome. I had been using this bookmarklet:

  javascript:(function(e,a,g,h,f,c,b,d)%7Bif(!(f=e.jQuery)%7C%7Cg>f.fn.jquery%7C%7Ch(f))%7Bc=a.createElement("script");c.type="text/javascript";c.src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/"+g+"/jquery.min.js";c.onload=c.onreadystatechange=function()%7Bif(!b&&(!(d=this.readyState)%7C%7Cd=="loaded"%7C%7Cd=="complete"))%7Bh((f=e.jQuery).noConflict(1),b=1);f(c).remove()%7D%7D;a.documentElement.childNodes%5B0%5D.appendChild(c)%7D%7D)(window,document,"1.3.2",function($,L)%7B$('%23header, .pagehead, .breadcrumb, .commit, .meta, %23footer, %23footer-push, .wiki-actions, %23last-edit, .actions, .header,.site-footer,.repository-sidebar,.file-navigation').remove(); $('%23files, .file').css(%7B"background":"none", "border":"none"%7D); $('link').removeAttr('media');%7D);javascript:(function(e,a,g,h,f,c,b,d)%7Bif(!(f=e.jQuery)%7C%7Cg>f.fn.jquery%7C%7Ch(f))%7Bc=a.createElement("script");c.type="text/javascript";c.src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/"+g+"/jquery.min.js";c.onload=c.onreadystatechange=function()%7Bif(!b&&(!(d=this.readyState)%7C%7Cd=="loaded"%7C%7Cd=="complete"))%7Bh((f=e.jQuery).noConflict(1),b=1);f(c).remove()%7D%7D;a.documentElement.childNodes%5B0%5D.appendChild(c)%7D%7D)(window,document,"1.3.2",function($,L)%7B$('%23header, .pagehead, .breadcrumb, .commit, .meta, %23footer, %23footer-push, .wiki-actions, %23last-edit, .actions, .header,.site-footer,.repository-sidebar,.file-navigation').remove(); $('%23files, .file').css(%7B"background":"none", "border":"none"%7D); $('link').removeAttr('media');%7D);

keehun• 12 years ago

It keeps on printing blank pages. And, only blank pages.

flog9• 12 years ago

On separate URLs?

sb2nov2• 12 years ago

Is it possible to print gists right now ?

flog9• 12 years ago

No, not right now. Will add that to the task list too. Thanks

sb2nov2• 12 years ago

Are there any plans to open source this ?

dfc5• 12 years ago

  $ pandoc  -o gist.pdf http://gist.github.com/BLAHBLAH

bunkat• 12 years ago

What are you using to generate the PDF? I've been looking for a good html to PDF converter for a project I'm working on.

flog9• 12 years ago

It's Phantom doing the printing.

boldrikboldrik• 12 years ago

Foxit Phantom? Sorry, I'm new to this.

dfc5• 12 years ago

  $ pandoc -o out.pdf README.md

csense• 12 years ago

More cross-browser testing is in order.

In Chromium on Linux Mint, it wants to download the PDF file right away (doesn't wait for a button press). And it never actually loads, just keeps showing the loading icon.

isaacb• 12 years ago

In Chromium this initiates an automatic download as soon as I open the URL. Yuck. Otherwise, cool service.

cec• 12 years ago

Great service! I noticed however that it is unable to resolve image paths that use relative addresses.

Example: https://gitprint.com/chriscummins/pip-db Image tag: ![pip-db](Documentation/assets/logo.png)

flog9• 12 years ago

Great point. Will see what I can do.

thirdknife• 12 years ago

Nice tool. I started thinking of applications already.

jimktrains2• 12 years ago

I've been fighting with print css for a while this week. I guess they just render it server side and show a pdf?

I wish print css was more supported. I'll read blog articles describing my plight, but from 10 years ago. It makes me sad.

spiralpolitik• 12 years ago

Doesn't appear to handle markdown GISTs on gist.github.com. Probably a fairly easy fix if you just create a gist.gitprint.com alias and rewrite the request URL to the slightly different pattern.

Otherwise excellent work.

mplewis• 12 years ago

Nice work!

AdrianRossouw• 12 years ago

so i've been taking a similar tack with my online portfolio, although i haven't followed through completely.

i really despise word processors, so i've been building out a jekyll/github pages site with each of my past jobs/projects as small markdown posts with the necessary metadata.

Then on the theme level I pull in the markdown files into a responsive site that degrades down all the way to mobile, and that has a print stylesheet that will generate a presentable resume from all this content.

I never really seem to get to the point of finishing the print stylesheet, because I seem to always find a job before I get to that point.

Still, at least now I can just update some small text files as I continue my career, and ultimately it just feels more sensible for me to manage that data than something like LinkedIn.

I was also thinking about adding some client side filtering of the past projects/jobs based on the technologies I tag them with, so I can generate a customized resume for each position. Maybe if I abstract it out into a separate project ...

omegote• 12 years ago

Bookmarklet to jump from github to gitprint

  javascript:if (location.href.slice(0,18) == "https://github.com" && document.body.classList.contains('page-blob')) location.href = 'https://gitprint.com' + location.href.slice(18)

jbaudanza• 12 years ago

This is great! In the past, I've had to write kudgy scripts to do this. Two features requests:

  - Syntax highlighting on code blocks
  - Ability to insert page breaks

Great work!

thearn4• 12 years ago

Agreed, syntax highlighting for repos with a lot of example code blocks in their README.md would be great:

https://gitprint.com/thearn/stl_tools

flog9• 12 years ago

Are you expecting to print in B/W or colour? B/W syntax printing poses a great design challenge ;) Should be fun

joshpeek2• 12 years ago

This looks so great. I just looked at the current print.css styles today on a README and they look really awful comparatively.

There might be some JS hacks that could be done on github.com itself to render a more stylized view when ⌘+P is pressed. Avoiding the need for a special "print this page" button.

reeze_xia• 12 years ago

Great, it looks beautiful!

@see https://gitprint.com/reeze/tipi, but Chinese text didn't display correct :(

Show HN: GitPrint.com – A site to easily print Markdown files on GitHub

Related Stories