Printing a FHIR IG

For folks who are used to working in Microsoft Word or with PDF documents, trying to review a FHIR Implementation Guide on the web can be a little bit daunting for the first time.  A colleague of mine tediously copied all the pages for a guide that we had produced for the Mobile Health workgroup so that others could do corrections in line.

It's really not that hard to do, just a tedious way to spend 15 minutes to an hour (depending on page count).

I've turned other highly linked web formats into single page HTML specs in the past ... it really isn't all that hard to do.  You need a scraping tool, HTML Tidy (jtidy won't cut it any more, it just hasn't gotten the love), and a very little bit of XSLT.  If the specification already has a table of contents page, it's even easier because then you don't have to worry about how to order the material.

Just about every FHIR IG now produces a ZIP file with the entire specification.  So, download the zip file, unzip it to a folder, and run the this XSLT against it (after you clean up the html).  I threw this together in like 10 minutes between five other things I'm trying to get done, but it worked.

If you are using a spec I worked on, there's a "download this specification" somewhere on the home page.  Otherwise, just replace index.html with full-ig.zip if the person who wrote the spec is using the FHIR IG Builder or older tools.  That will get you the full data.

1. for %f in (*.html) do c:\util\tidy -utf8 -asxhtml -n -m %f
2. java -cp c:\saxon9h2\saxon9he.jar net.sf.saxon.Transform -s:toc.html -xsl:gen_single.xsl  -o:single.html
3. single.html

After you've launched the output, you can:

1. Print to PDF
2. Copy and paste everything on the single page to a Word document and distribute it.
3. Turn on your printer and spend a ton of money printing something out.

There are a lot of places this could go.  I would love to see this little gist turned into something that would turn a FHIR IG not just into a PDF, but rather into an e-book.  It's not that difficult to do.  But, maybe I'll get back to it when the crazyness settles.

Meanwhile, stay sane, stay safe, and stay home.

    Keith