Anthologize for WordPress to Create PDF Reports

I’ve found that most of my course projects are best completed in segments. I publish most of those segments individually here on my site. This allows me to interlink between segments and to provide for a detailed and focused approach to each segment individually. By the end of a course, I have all the content ready to compile into a final report of some sort.

The question comes up, how do I build that report. I could transfer everything into LaTeX and render an APA style report. I could probably copy and paste it into Microsoft Word too. Before I went to that much trouble, I instead went looking and found a WordPress plugin that would create a high quality PDF report comprised of a set a posts that I choose.

I found Anthologize for WordPress.

Creating Reports from Website Posts

First I needed to identify the posts that should be part of the report. Anthologize made this easy. I can create as many Parts as I like. A Part is like a Chapter. I can then add to each Part as many Posts as I like. I can also sort the posts and even edit the content to better accommodate the printed output. The original post is left unchanged.

I then click Export and am able to choose items such as copyright attribution, authors, dedication and acknowledgements. I can also choose physical aspects of the output, such as page size (letter and A4), font face and size and where to put line breaks.  Once complete, it is possible to export the posts in the following formats:

• PDF
• RTF
• ePub
• HTML
• Anthologize TEI

The HTML output doesn’t seem very useful, since the original content is more or less HTML, and almost certainly online and available already. However, some programs, like Word, can open HTML for editing, so there may be a use case. The one I spent the most time with was PDF.

PDF Output

The PDF renders nicely, including images and tables. There was a quirk with the table plugin I use that rendered poorly when any cell was empty, so I had to make sure there was filler content in every cell that didn’t have data. It renders a table of contents, including the PDF navigation. Where I use the LaTeX plugin to render math functions, those came through as images, just as they do on the site.

I did make a few slight modifications to the plugin files to get a better cover page, but other than that, I used it as is, out of the box. Here’s what the output looks like.

You can download my Corporate Finance final project here to have a closer look.