7 ms·

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

68 points by flog 13y ago

flog 13y 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 13y ago
  Great service, thank you! I've already used it to print out https://gitprint.com/hueniverse/hawk https://gitprint.com/hueniverse/hawk
- jredburn 13y ago
  This is great. Would happily pay a few $$$ to be able to use on private repositories.
  - flog 13y ago
    I haven't looked into private repos yet, but good idea: will add it to the todo list.
    - joshpeek 13y ago
      Private markdown files should be accessible from a tokenized raw.github.com link. So it'd be neat if https://gitprint.com/josh/secret/master/REAMDE.md?token=123 https://gitprint.com/josh/secret/master/REAMDE.md?token=123 worked.
- dfc 13y 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
  - 616c 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown
    - dfc 13y ago
      The server load is due to using Latex for the typesetting. Is it surprising that publication quality typesetting takes more resources than the ragged right text that this puts out? No. Is it surprising that processing inline TeX equations or Bibtex citations takes more resources? No. Compare and Contrast: Gitprint's pdf of README: https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown Gitit's html export of README: http://gitit.net/README?printable http://gitit.net/README?printable If I don't care about the quality of the text layout gitit's printable html page is equivalent to the gitprint pdf. Adding Merriweather to default.html is trivial. But as another commentator pointed out maybe using a new trendy font might not be the best choice if you want decent unicode coverage; just in case one of your users is among the "minority" of people who were unsatisfied by the basic ASCII charset. Moreover comparing gitprint's markdown support to pandoc as if it is apples to apples is silly.
isaacb 13y ago
In Chromium this initiates an automatic download as soon as I open the URL. Yuck. Otherwise, cool service.
cec 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/chriscummins/pip-db Image tag: ![pip-db](Documentation/assets/logo.png)
- flog 13y ago
  Great point. Will see what I can do.
oneeyedpigeon 13y 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 :))
- flog 13y 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.
  - bowerbird 13y 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
    - flog 13y ago
      A bit strong, but have disabled the onload printing for now.
      - bowerbird 13y ago
        > A bit strong no, actually, it was just right. taking people to the print-set dialog when they have _clicked_a_link_ is not just confusing, it's unsettling. especially when -- as is common here on hacker news -- someone has opened several different tabs and thus has no idea which caused this totally unexpected situation. "unsettling" is quite deserving of the "awful" label. (perhaps that word has an emotional connotation to you. but i'm using it the same way that i would describe, say, a "saturday night live" skit that was worse than usual.) the "improvement" you have made is thus good... but... ...the current state is still unnecessarily confusing... clickers are shown a "jquery - new wave javascript" page. which is most definitely _not_ what they clicked to see. you have a perfectly good home-page explaining the service, and how we can use it quite easily, with a button to click to summon up a canned example if we want that. excellent! _that_ is where the h.n. link should go -- your home page. welcome people at the front door, and _then_ give the tour. don't just dump people into the middle of your canned demo, when some of them (certainly those who opened multiple tabs) will not even know exactly how they arrived there, or why. it would have been a little bit better if your demo content was an explanatory page about gitprint itself. but even then, linking to the home-page is still a much smarter strategy... maybe you'll think this is "strong" too. it's not. i'm just telling you like it is. i don't have any emotion invested. this is dispassionate. i don't even care if you heed what i say or not. it's no skin off my nose. i'm just trying to help you. remember, i was the _only_ person who commented on this when you posted it last week. "good idea", i posted... so instead of getting criticized this week, you _should_ have said "thank you", and then implemented my suggestion. there's still time... -bowerbird
hodgesmr 13y 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 13y ago
It keeps on printing blank pages. And, only blank pages.
- flog 13y ago
  On separate URLs?
sb2nov 13y ago
Is it possible to print gists right now ?
- flog 13y ago
  No, not right now. Will add that to the task list too. Thanks
  - sb2nov 13y ago
    Are there any plans to open source this ?
    - Lord_DeathMatch 13y ago
      https://github.com/adamburmister/gitprint.com https://github.com/adamburmister/gitprint.com
- dfc 13y ago
  $ pandoc -o gist.pdf http://gist.github.com/BLAHBLAH
bunkat 13y 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.
- flog 13y ago
  It's Phantom doing the printing.
  - boldrikboldrik 13y ago
    Foxit Phantom? Sorry, I'm new to this.
    - martinml 13y ago
      http://phantomjs.org/ http://phantomjs.org/
- dfc 13y ago
  $ pandoc -o out.pdf README.md
csense 13y 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.
thirdknife 13y ago
Nice tool. I started thinking of applications already.
jimktrains2 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
Nice work!
AdrianRossouw 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/thearn/stl_tools
  - flog 13y ago
    Are you expecting to print in B/W or colour? B/W syntax printing poses a great design challenge ;) Should be fun
joshpeek 13y 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 13y ago
Great, it looks beautiful! @see https://gitprint.com/reeze/tipi https://gitprint.com/reeze/tipi, but Chinese text didn't display correct :(

68 points by flog 13y ago

flog 13y 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 13y ago
Great service, thank you! I've already used it to print out https://gitprint.com/hueniverse/hawk https://gitprint.com/hueniverse/hawk
jredburn 13y ago
This is great. Would happily pay a few $$$ to be able to use on private repositories.
- flog 13y ago
  I haven't looked into private repos yet, but good idea: will add it to the todo list.
  - joshpeek 13y ago
    Private markdown files should be accessible from a tokenized raw.github.com link. So it'd be neat if https://gitprint.com/josh/secret/master/REAMDE.md?token=123 https://gitprint.com/josh/secret/master/REAMDE.md?token=123 worked.
dfc 13y 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
- 616c 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown
  - dfc 13y ago
    The server load is due to using Latex for the typesetting. Is it surprising that publication quality typesetting takes more resources than the ragged right text that this puts out? No. Is it surprising that processing inline TeX equations or Bibtex citations takes more resources? No. Compare and Contrast: Gitprint's pdf of README: https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown https://gitprint.com/jgm/gitit/blob/master/README.markdown Gitit's html export of README: http://gitit.net/README?printable http://gitit.net/README?printable If I don't care about the quality of the text layout gitit's printable html page is equivalent to the gitprint pdf. Adding Merriweather to default.html is trivial. But as another commentator pointed out maybe using a new trendy font might not be the best choice if you want decent unicode coverage; just in case one of your users is among the "minority" of people who were unsatisfied by the basic ASCII charset. Moreover comparing gitprint's markdown support to pandoc as if it is apples to apples is silly.

isaacb 13y ago

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

cec 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/chriscummins/pip-db Image tag: ![pip-db](Documentation/assets/logo.png)

flog 13y ago
Great point. Will see what I can do.

oneeyedpigeon 13y 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 :))

flog 13y 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.
- bowerbird 13y 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
  - flog 13y ago
    A bit strong, but have disabled the onload printing for now.
    - bowerbird 13y ago
      > A bit strong no, actually, it was just right. taking people to the print-set dialog when they have _clicked_a_link_ is not just confusing, it's unsettling. especially when -- as is common here on hacker news -- someone has opened several different tabs and thus has no idea which caused this totally unexpected situation. "unsettling" is quite deserving of the "awful" label. (perhaps that word has an emotional connotation to you. but i'm using it the same way that i would describe, say, a "saturday night live" skit that was worse than usual.) the "improvement" you have made is thus good... but... ...the current state is still unnecessarily confusing... clickers are shown a "jquery - new wave javascript" page. which is most definitely _not_ what they clicked to see. you have a perfectly good home-page explaining the service, and how we can use it quite easily, with a button to click to summon up a canned example if we want that. excellent! _that_ is where the h.n. link should go -- your home page. welcome people at the front door, and _then_ give the tour. don't just dump people into the middle of your canned demo, when some of them (certainly those who opened multiple tabs) will not even know exactly how they arrived there, or why. it would have been a little bit better if your demo content was an explanatory page about gitprint itself. but even then, linking to the home-page is still a much smarter strategy... maybe you'll think this is "strong" too. it's not. i'm just telling you like it is. i don't have any emotion invested. this is dispassionate. i don't even care if you heed what i say or not. it's no skin off my nose. i'm just trying to help you. remember, i was the _only_ person who commented on this when you posted it last week. "good idea", i posted... so instead of getting criticized this week, you _should_ have said "thank you", and then implemented my suggestion. there's still time... -bowerbird

hodgesmr 13y 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 13y ago

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

flog 13y ago
On separate URLs?

sb2nov 13y ago

Is it possible to print gists right now ?

flog 13y ago
No, not right now. Will add that to the task list too. Thanks
- sb2nov 13y ago
  Are there any plans to open source this ?
  - Lord_DeathMatch 13y ago
    https://github.com/adamburmister/gitprint.com https://github.com/adamburmister/gitprint.com
dfc 13y ago
$ pandoc -o gist.pdf http://gist.github.com/BLAHBLAH

bunkat 13y 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.

flog 13y ago
It's Phantom doing the printing.
- boldrikboldrik 13y ago
  Foxit Phantom? Sorry, I'm new to this.
  - martinml 13y ago
    http://phantomjs.org/ http://phantomjs.org/
dfc 13y ago
$ pandoc -o out.pdf README.md

csense 13y 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.

thirdknife 13y ago

Nice tool. I started thinking of applications already.

jimktrains2 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago

Nice work!

AdrianRossouw 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 https://gitprint.com/thearn/stl_tools
- flog 13y ago
  Are you expecting to print in B/W or colour? B/W syntax printing poses a great design challenge ;) Should be fun

joshpeek 13y 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 13y ago

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