As I mentioned in last weeks ALS Weekly Update, we have been hard at work fixing our PDF generator on the Adafruit Learning System.

Anyone who spends a lot of time working with the Adobe PDF format knows how painful the process can be. This is doubly true when trying to automatically convert documents and webpages to PDF. The PDF generator for the Adafruit Learning System has, for years, been unreliable and buggy. We have kept the PDF generator from breaking with lots of duct tape and bubble gum, but eventually we ran out of bubble gum. So, we decided to do a complete overhaul of the PDF generator.

Many of you may wonder why anyone would even want a PDF version of a Learn guide. There are many niche reasons to use the PDF version, but the vast majority of those who use the PDF version of guides are educators who load them on tablets without internet access for children to use. This also meant when PDFs were broken, it was especially disruptive to those who needed them for an upcoming class.

The good news is, not only did we fix many of the issues, but PDF’s are much cleaner and more compact. They should be easier to read and we should have far fewer bugs (these are still PDFs, so we expect plenty of bug fixes in the future, but it should be less).

The new PDF generator should be launched very soon, so keep an eye out for it if this update is for you!

Well, we are happy to report that this feature has been released. Head on over to ALS and give it a try. Please let us know if you find any issues or bugs!