Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Sandcastle to dead tree format woes

For reasons partially unknown to me, I was tasked with converting Sandcastle generated API documentation to dead tree format.

The best way seems to be feeding some magic XSLT to Sandcastle that would that would directly create PDF via XSL-FO or DocBook or whatever. However, I haven't been able to find such a thing and I'm not ready to put down that kind of work to create it myself at this point.

Another option I pursued was to print the CHM to XPS/PDF but this has its own cons. Firstly directly printing from CHM viewer strips CSS rendering ugliness. This is correctable by finding the correct html file from %TEMP% and a little search/replace magic and providing the stylesheets and images.

Having gotten this far I found out that the stylesheet needs to use something else but relative font size to keep the text legible.

Now as if this wasn't enough the browser or at least the PDF/XPS "printer" chokes on the sheer amount of input, still not finished after N hours, and this just for the documentation of a smallish test assembly. :(

This does not look feasible at this point.

Bright ideas appreciated!