A project I did when I was working in the University. It was a web application that would be used to layout pages and generate pdf magazines. A magazine editor.

In the frontend it was a full javascript application, my first big one. This was before the days of backbone and other frontend frameworks.

It was written in pure javascript with jQuery and jQuery UI to support.

The design in general was quite poor but it was full of nice functionality.

Some of the features:

• Auto generated index.
• Templates for the magazine page layouts, headers and style. (some predefined ones and a mechanism to add new ones)
• Predetermined page layouts and also free-form boxes and images.
• Save and load current magazine issue.
• Pdf download rendered from the magazine issue.
• Integration with external sources for article and image retrieval.

A challenge at the time was to get the rendering from web pages to PDF. For that I used a Firefox on the server (it gave me a few stability problems).

The result of the printing process was a bit unstable for the server in terms of memory management but it was pretty powerful in terms of layouts, css and pdf printing for the client.

A lot of JavaScript was learnt.