PDF Version of Programming Interface documentation

[soswow]

There was a post where someone asked for .chm version of API documentation. It was given. I've asked for PDF version (mac not a friend of .chm) and I was told it doesn't exists. Well, it didn't exist, but now it does.

I've wrote a scraper that uses JSONP interfaces /learning uses to generate big and fat html file. I convert this into PDF afterwords.

As a bonus feature it deals with code syntax highlighting. I also rewired all H1 / H2 / H3 etc to be as a big hierarchical document. This allowed final PDF to have nice outline on the left.

 All looks like this:

 And the best part it's searchable now. Quick and easy.

The PDF is awailable to download here [58 MB]

[Anonymous]

just 6777 pages 

How much trouble would it be to do the same for the regular user manual part?

I don't have much programming knowledge but I will peruse through this because it seems it might give me a better understanding of how Fusion works behind the scenes.

Cheers!

Niels

[soswow]

What exactly do you mean by "regular user manual" ?

You mean everthing in http://fusion360.autodesk.com/learning/learning.html ? Yeah, it's possible. Will post.

That PDF just takes everything under "Programming Interface"

[daniel_lyall]

@soswow Thank you
, you just proved a point it can be done if one wont`s it to be done ADSK come on a user did it for you 

[jordan783ZS]

Hey @soswow could you share the code you used to make this? I'd love to generate an updated version of the API pdf.
Cheers

[BrianEkins]

I didn't see this thread before and wanted to make a comment. The previous assumption was that someone asked for the CHM and Autodesk did the work to create it and provided it. That's not entirely true. The system used to generate the help content for Fusion is the same one used by Inventor. Inventor's primary help format is CHM, so a CHM was already being created but it wasn't being delivered. All that was done was to make the existing CHM publicly available.

Creating a PDF version of the help would be a big task. I did look into this a bit at one point and found one issue I  didn't find a solution for. It seems like there should be a solution but I didn't find it in my brief research. The problem is creating links between topics. The links that exist in the PDF file that was generated are standard URL links and will redirect you to the standard content in a browser, not to the same topic within the PDF document. Without this, it seems that using a PDF version of the documentation would be a bit frustrating.