Blog :: Welcome to Cheatography!

Cheatography is a whole website dedicated to cheat sheets! Find cheat sheets that help you out, or build and share your own to help other people!

Cheatography was born a long time ago, the spawn of the Added Bytes cheat sheets and a short-lived cheat sheet request system. It was obvious from the requested cheat sheets and number of votes for each that there was no way I could produce as many cheat sheets as were wanted by myself, and that I did not know enough about enough topics to provide a decent reference for them.

The solution seemed obvious - build a site that allowed people to make their own cheat sheets. And so, Cheatography was born.

Building begins ... and stalls

The first few incarnations of Cheatography were an attempt to build a system that would allow anyone to create a PDF cheat sheet in the style of the others on Added Bytes. This, it turns out, is harder than you'd think. Despite the proliferation of PHP-based HTML to PDF converters, issues like line wrapping, nested tables, font kerning and distribution, page headers and file sizes stopped me from finding a way to produce PDFs that were of a high enough standard to produce and print.

Better than PDF

But as one door closed, another opened. While I thought I couldn't do PDFs the way I wanted to, I could now use HTML, and that meant I could include all sorts of new goodies - comments, videos, images and links just to start. It also meant cheat sheets could be properly bookmarked, were quick to download, and best of all quick to update and add to.

The down side, unfortunately, was that when you printed one it looked terrible.

Eureka!

One of the fine folk over at Stack Overflow pointed me in the direction of the wkhtmloptf project, a tool for using Webkit to convert HTML to PDF. A couple of hours later, I had the quality of PDF I was after, with a quick generation time and a small file size.

There are a couple of minor downsides to the new system, primarily related to pagination. The new cheat sheets do not span pages very well and a header and footer cannot be added to every page. These are small sacrifices to make though, for the ability to produce PDF versions of the cheat sheets. And I'll keep working on the problem.

What if I find a mistake or bug?

The site is in beta at the moment, which means it's a bit new and there are still bits that aren't quite perfect. If you find a problem with anything relate to the site, please email support@cheatography.com (or leave a comment here if you prefer). I'd also love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions for how I can improve the site!

Welcome to Cheatography! was posted on 30th October, 2011.
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