Very preliminary documentation; sorry about that. :-)

You'll need:

  - A web server (I use Apache 2, with mpm-itk[1] to separate the ugliness
    from the rest of the server installation).
  - ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org/).
  - Perl (http://www.perl.org/), with the CGI and HTML::Entities modules.
  - OpenOffice.org (http://www.openoffice.org/ -- doh), tested with v1.1
    only. See below for special configuration needed.
  - GhostScript, probably almost any halfway recent version; newer ones
    have better font support etc., though. (For some odd PostScript font
    stuff, you might even need the latest AFPL version from CVS, if you
    can live with its license.) http://www.ghostscript.com/ has it all.
  - vim (http://www.vim.org/).
  - gnome-web-photo, currently only available from GNOME's CVS
    (http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-web-photo/, do
    cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome co gnome-web-photo
    to check out).

[1]: http://home.samfundet.no/~sesse/mpm-itk/


Configuration

mkdir output/
$EDITOR config.pm
$EDITOR index.html, so your site doesn't look like mine :-)


Special OpenOffice.org configuration

First of all, you'll need an X server (since OO.o needs one to do even -help).
Xvfb will do nicely:

  nohup Xvfb :25 &

(Note that gnome-web-photo seems to be a bit picky about the color depth.
If you get all black images in your PDFs, add "-screen scrn 800x600x24"
to the Xvfb command line and see if it helps.)

Then, you'll need to log in as the CGI user (yes, yuck :-) ), run
OpenOffice.org for the first time, accept the license etc. Then you'll have
to add a new printer -- use spadmin (in the same directory as soffice), add
a new printer by the name of “pdf” (probably slightly misnamed, as it will
output PostScript, but OK). It's going to be a “PDF converter”, using

  /whatever/path/you/have/cat-into "(OUTPUT)"

as command line, and your output directory as appropriate. Also remember to
set the page size if you don't happen to prefer Letter already.


Special vim configuration

You might want a simple .vimrc for your user as well; mine reads

  set fileencodings=utf-8,iso8859-1
  syn on
  set bg=dark
  
(Yes, for some reason bg=dark looks better when printing. Don't ask me why.)


Happy hacking :-)

  -- Steinar H. Gunderson <sgunderson@bigfoot.com>, http://www.sesse.net/
     (and of course, http://pdf.sesse.net/)