Cascajal

Cascajal is a script which automates generating PDFs from Hieroglyph presentations using Firefox.

How It Works

Hieroglyph generates HTML presentations from Restructured Text documents. Sometimes, however, you need a PDF. For the conference organizer, Speaker Deck, etc. Cascajal automates generating that PDF using Firefox.

Installing

You can install Cascajal using pip:

$ pip install --user cascajal

Note that you'll need to have the user binary directory on your PATH; see pip 2014 if you need help with that.

Cascajal doesn't have any external Python dependencies. It does depend on Firefox (or Iceweasel, or something Firefox-like).

Generating PDFs

After you've installed Cascajal, you can generate a PDF of your slides.

$ make slides # this runs Hieroglyph; see the Hieroglyph docs
$ cascajal -o slides.pdf ./_build/slides/index.html

Cascajal will create a temporary Firefox profile, launch the browser, and print to a PDF. After printing completes, you can close the browser, or Cascajal will do it for you after a few seconds.

You'll get something like https://speakerdeck.com/nyergler/in-depth-pdb as output.

Wait, but...

• My slides aren't rendering correctly!!

  What theme are you using? Cascajal works best with the slides2 theme in Hieroglyph. slides and single-level both have some known issues; your mileage may vary.

• How does Cascajal find Firefox on my system?

  Poorly.

  Right now it looks in a couple of common places where it might be installed on Linux. At some point I'll add common places for Mac OS X. I'd love it if someone using Windows helped make detection work there.

• Why Firefox?

  Of the tools I tried, Firefox came the closest to working "out of the box". Cascajal just tries to smooth over all the settings (documented and otherwise) that you need to set to make it work.

• What not PhantomJS?

  Phantom currently does not support web fonts. So while it does an amazing job of generating in a headless fashion, even simple things like monospace fonts render incorrectly.

  PhantomJS 2 is currently under development, and should include improved support for web fonts. It's not hard to imagine a Cascajal of the future that uses Phantom, and works even better.

• How can I help?

  Try it out, let me know what doesn't work!

  See HACKING.rst for information on how to edit the code.

• What's up with the name?

  According to Wikipedia,

  The Cascajal Block is a tablet-sized writing slab made of serpentinite from Mexico which has been dated to the early first millennium BCE, incised with hitherto unknown characters that may represent the earliest writing system in the New World.

  So Cascajal is a writing slab for your Hieroglyphs.