Contributing to Seneca OER

I had a chance to contribute to IPC144, a work in progress which aims to upgrade the current IPC144 website using Docusaurus.

The issue:

I chose a pretty interesting issue to work on which asked me to convert the website into a pdf, the future students would be able to take notes partly thanks to me, yay!

Solving the issue:

I took a look at a few packages that convert Docusaurus website into a pdf and I came to a conclusion to using mr-pdf as it supported Docusaurus v.2 and had multiple options.

Using mr-pdf

I created a shell script to run a line of command to convert the website into a pdf and added the script to the scripts of package.json.

#!/usr/bin/env bashnpx mr-pdf --initialDocURLs="http://localhost:3000" --contentSelector="article" --paginationSelector=".pagination-nav__item--next > a" --excludeSelectors=".margin-vert--xl a,.theme-edit-this-page,.tocCollapsible_1PrD theme-doc-toc-mobile tocMobile_3Hoh,.tocCollapsibleButton_2O1e" --coverImage="https://download.logo.wine/logo/Seneca_College/Seneca_College-Logo.wine.png" --coverTitle="IPC144" --outputPDFFilename "Seneca-IPC144.pdf"

Another issue came up, as mr-pdf required a running instance of the website (initialDocURLs), the pagination target (paginationSelector), I needed to create a way for the project to build and serve.

Creating a way to automatic build, serve and convert

I wrote a Javascript file that used execa to handle child processes and wait-on to wait for resources on the localhost to be available and then converted the page into a pdf. Killing the port was the last thing to do.

Conclusion

My PR technically was working but I had to to spend quite a while fix to meet the standard, and I made a bunch of small, syntactic errors. Some of which I didn't know but thanks to the experience, I think I will not make those mistakes again.