Have you ever tried to convert Github Wiki into PDF?

Github wiki is a great solution for creating well struct and easy to browse documentations. More of that it is placed near your code, issues and release notes. Yeah Github is great :)

But what if you are working on private repo, SDK is in active development phase and you need to share doc with potential customer ?

There are two possible solutions :

1. Go to Google Docs and copy and format all of your pages from Github Wiki.
2. Find a tool that will automatically generate a doc from your Wiki repo.

If you really want to hear why the first one is ugly :

• Write in one place, copy to another
• Not just copy, but copy and format all the code, images and so on, so on..
• You remember, the product is in active development, a lot of changes to doc as well. Change wiki, go to Google Doc, find the place, make changes there. And you will be doing this a lot of times.

Sounds cool? This is what the developers dream to do ? Right?

Yes, you are correct we will choose the second one, as this is really what we like to do, automate everything :)

So we need a tool that can save us from copy pasting. You can think to create your own one, but why to create a wheel again?

Lets google it, there should be already some quick solution for this. It should be easy and fast, I’m sure.

Heh, I was so innocent while thinking like this. Off course there was solutions, like a Haskell Pandoc or Python script that is using the same Pandoc, Wkhtmltopdf and some html comments inside of markdown pages to generate a PDF.

But both of solutions was not enough to cover my needs :

• Generate a TOC (Table of contents) and render the pages in the same order as it was in my `_Sidebar.md` file (responsible for TOC, placed on the right, of Github Wiki)
• Find and generate the page ids in whole file, not only for the page beginning
• Support of Github Wiki links [[..]]
• Highlight the code
• Easy to customize the style

Then I found great Java script solution called Limedocs Wiki Converter. It almost suited my needs (at least it was generating a TOC and pages in the way I needed).

We all love Open Source, and one of the biggest reasons of it is Fork. You can take something and update it to the way you need.

Meet Github Wikito Converter.

The tool that allows you to generate HTML & PDF documentation from your Github wiki or any other markdown-based wiki. It is build on top of Limedocs Wiki Converter and contains new features and bug fixes, check the release notes to see them.

It is using Marked to create HTML from Wiki and then Wkhtmltopdf to convert if to PDF.

To use it you first need to install Node.js or io.js.

Also, if you want to generate PDF along with HTML, install Wkhtmltopdf.

Then install a tool it self.

npm install -g github-wikito-converter

Clone your Wiki.

git clone https://github.com/yakivmospan/github-wikito-converter.wiki.git

And finally convert it.

gwtc ./github-wikito-converter.wiki

You can checkout samples and see more information about usage, customization and supported formats at github.

Hope this post will help you to save some time and easily create the doc you need. Cheers