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ContuttoPDF (Wordpress Plugin to convert your Content to PDF)

Posted by Daniel - 10,668 Views

Before I finally found this plugin, I had been using MS-Word Printer Addins which only provide limited flexibilities for example they won’t transfer MS-Word hyperlink into the created PDF file and that is not the result I want get.

OK lets talk about this plugin. ContuttoPDF is a Wordpress plugin which I think you should have when you need to convert your WordPress post content into PDF file. It’s a great plugin and it’s relatively quite easy to install and yes it will transfer your hyperlink to the created PDF - perfect enough for me…

The ContuttoPDF plugin is based on DOMPDF which requires PHP 5 and it needs several extensions to be activated in order to be able to run. Following are the extensions which need to be activated before installing ContuttoPDF:

1. XML extension
2. GD extension
3. PCRE extension
4. DOM extension
5. MBstring extension

Installing the plugin

1. Upload the folder pdf-themes to your wp-content/ directory.
2. Upload the folder contuttopdf to your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
3. Important: Change the permissions of the directory wp-content/plugins/contuttopdf/dompdf/lib/fonts, so that it is writable by the web server.
4. Go to your Plugins page. In the description text for the ContuttoPDF plugin, click on “compatibility test”.
   If all requirements are met and the generating of the demo page works, you can activate the plugin.
5. Now put a PDF button on your page with < ?php contutto_pdfbutton(); ?> somewhere in your template. Instead of a button, you can also have a text, with something like < ?php contutto_pdfbutton(’This page as PDF’); ?>. You can apply CSS styling to the anchor via its id=”pdfbutton”.

Note: ContuttoPDF use theme based styling to create the design layout of the PDF. To run it for the first time please make sure you copy the “pdf-themes” folder included in the instalation package to /wp-content folder of your WordPress instalation.

if you experiencing an error related to something like insufficient memory that means you need to set the memory limit to run the application a little bit higher. For example, to increase the memory limit you can put this line into the php.ini file:

To see the result of PDF created with this plugin, you can click the “This page as PDF” link on the footer block of this post. You can download ContuttoPDF from the plugin’s homepage and one advice: don’t use DAP, somehow I get forbidden message when using it to download this plugin.

Download ContuttoPDF Wordpress Plugin (270 KB)

If you need a clue to start customizing the PDF output, you can also read my post here. It’s simple, you only need to edit the CSS for basic layout.