Picture of Sherri Fricker
Printable Version of the Course
by Sherri Fricker - Tuesday, 15 June 2021, 10:23 PM
 

Hello,

I have a client that is asking for a printable version of the course for instructor review and accessibility purposes. Is this something that can be easily generated from the Adapt Authoring tool?

Thanks,

 

Currently, we’re on:

  • Authoring tool version 0.10.5
  • Framework version 5.12.1
Picture of Chuck Lorenz
Re: Printable Version of the Course
by Chuck Lorenz - Wednesday, 16 June 2021, 12:47 AM
 

"for instructor review and accessibility purposes"
Hi Sherri. "for instructor review" is easily understood.
How a PDF can be used to assess "accessibility purposes" is less clear.
Can you explain a little more?

Personally, I know of no Adapt-specific way to create a printable version of the course. Have you tried "printing to PDF"? Right-click the webpage to bring up the context menu and select "Print..."; then choose something like "Print to PDF" as the value for "destination." You may get lucky. 

Honestly, it has rarely succeeded for me.
(a) CSS recognizes a print device and looks for a print stylesheet--and that's where it can get messy: few developers (none?) are tasked with or paid for ensuring a quality printed facsimile.
(b) Interactive components such as Accordion and Hot Graphic won't automatically cycle through their items for the print-to-PDF process.

While I'm sure that there must be a number of techniques for generating a PDF from a course. I wonder if the resulting output can satisfy your requirements for review purposes. (For other purposes I have used a browser app called "Save as PDF." https://pdfcrowd.com/save-as-pdf-addon/ But it works only with publicly hosted pages--not with AT Previews.)

Adobe Acrobat has a toolbar addon that I suspect does a decent conversion job--but you'll need a subscription to Acrobat (I don't have one, so I haven't tested this.) 

And there are a variety of ways to get the content JSON out of the course for review (e.g., https://github.com/cgkineo/adapt2html and even framework grunt commands). But these are better suited for editorial purposes than for instructor review.

Well, this is a conversation starter. Hopefully someone will stop by with a technique that satisfies your needs..

Picture of Sherri Fricker
Re: Printable Version of the Course
by Sherri Fricker - Wednesday, 16 June 2021, 2:10 PM
 

TBH I also don't see the need for a PDF of the course. I think the client has had courses in the past that weren't accessible and is used to having a paper copy of the course. I think they believe that a PDF will be accessible if the course is not.

I know there is a built-in feature in Articulate Rise 360 that allows for Export to PDF and just wondered if there was something similar in Adapt.

Thanks for your response. It was very helpful!

Picture of Barry Jenkin
Re: Printable Version of the Course
by Barry Jenkin - Wednesday, 23 June 2021, 2:15 AM
 

If it's for end user purposes, you could try King's College print-page extension which adds a print button either to your header or end of page. It prints the completed/viewed content on that page. I'm not sure if this will give the most condensed read however - depending how your pages are designed (the result can be a bit gappy). 

If the goal is to extract just the text for review purposes, another option might be page2textfile which outputs all text (per page) to a text file. This is intended for authors/developers and involves a url change to enable, so it may require some fiddling to create buttons and make user friendly. One limitation with this from memory is that it doesn't extract text from quiz feedbacks, although you may be able to sneak around this by repeating any essential content in a hidden text component.

Picture of Sherri Fricker
Re: Printable Version of the Course
by Sherri Fricker - Wednesday, 23 June 2021, 1:10 PM
 

Thanks, Barry! The print-page looks like it might work! Do you know if there is a version that works on Fraemork 5 and up?

Picture of Mike Stevens
Re: Printable Version of the Course
by Mike Stevens - Wednesday, 23 June 2021, 6:05 PM
 

Hi Sherri, here is the framework 5+ version. I forgot to post it in my readme page of the Framework 4 version. You can find it here...

https://github.com/zarek3333/adapt-page2TextFile