Exporting individual chapters to PDF

I’ve had a request from a faculty member who is writing a casebook us in our Pressbooks instance to be able to export individual chapters as PDF so he can give them to students as he teaches this semester. I know that he can go through the list of chapters and just clear the export check boxes except for the chapter(s) he wants and then do the export (he’s willing to do that) but I was wondering if there is an easier way to just get a PDF of a given chapter.
We’re running PB 4.3.5.

Short answer: Clicking is currently the only way:

Longer answer: We worked on preview prototype a bit in the summer but stopped because the implementation was not good enough:

Although the whole concept of preview went back to the drawing board, the backend code is still in Pressbooks. It can be activated by appending ?preview[0]=111&preview[1]=222&preview[2]=333 to a URL where 111, 222, and 333 are post_ids.

Examples:

More code in this reverted commit for good measure.

If you want to to play around with manipulating a URL, or code a plugin that takes advantage of this, then you might get what you want. IMHO this is much harder than the clicking checkboxes solution but I wanted to share the option.

Cheers.

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Coincidentally, I also have a faculty member ask about this this week, so this may become a trend as our reach and usage expands.

It’s on the roadmap:

See: “Add support for chapter-level exports”

Not high (or medium) priority, but it’s there. @emasters if you are interested in discussing how Cali can get that bumped up in priority, let me know.

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A scenario where this functionality would be handy: when writing a chapter and/or finalizing a chapter for print one could efficiently iteratively edit the chapter and create the PDF of the chapter (optimize page-breaks).

As of today this code has been removed in it’s entirety.

Instead, there’s been progress on paged.js as a preview mechanism for PDFs. Still no definite solution though.

I appreciate three things about this thread:

  1. That the team continues to be very responsive to the community of users. 2. That they keep high standards and didn’t roll out something where the implementation didn’t meet those standards, and 3. that they kept the idea on the back burner until a new and different solution came through.

Thanks everyone.

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