John Harry

Thanks, heymoe. Care to share how you created it? I know there are methods for converting html to pdf but don't know anything about them.

garberfc

+1

heymoe

I'm sure there are other ways of doing this but here are the steps at a high level.
_

• Load up Audi Online Owner's Manual site with a VIN for the manual you want to convert
• Click the Zoom button and slide the slider to max zoom on single page
• Next, explore the page source code looking for the link / URL that is used to load the image of the currently zoomed in page (Developer Tools in Chrome)
  • The name of the image file increments for each page of the manual (page0001_4.jpg - page0408_4.jpg for example)
• Now download the JPG for each page of the manual (curl in linux)
• Then converted each of the page JPG files into a PDF version (img2pdf in linux) Can skip this step since pdfjoin can do the JPG to PDF + Merge itself
• Then merged each of the PDF page files into a single PDF file (pdfjoin in linux)
• Finally ran the merged PDF file though OCR to make it searchable (ocrmypdf in linux)

Can create others if there are requests.

John Harry

Thanks!

garberfc

Thanks! Are all the pdf programs standard with linux?

Signed, a suffering, measly, windoze user

heymoe

I can't speak for all the different Linux distributions but it looks like Arch, Debian and Ubuntu have all the different PDF programs in their software repository. Even if the apps are not included in the distro's software repo, you can always install them from source too.

ChrisBWJ

Were you able to automate the jpg download process, or did you have to do each one manually? Same with the PDF conversion process?

If you did it all page by page, I think there are a number of us who owe you an adult beverage of your choice!

heymoe

I did write a small script that generated a batch file with all the curl commands to download all the page JPGs. The other apps for the PDF conversion and OCR could be run using a single command-line with wildcards or linux command-line shortcuts / stacking.

So over all not a fully automated process but also not a completely manual and time consuming one command at a time per page type of thing either.

ChrisBWJ

Still an effort worthy of an adult beverage on me if our paths ever cross!!

Thank you for doing this!

garberfc

+1