[Seaside] Re: PDF Generation

[Martin Beck]

Am Dienstag 07 November 2006 18:00 schrieb Yanni Chiu:
> Martin Beck wrote:
> >>> is it possible in Seaside to generate a pdf in any way from a html
> >>> output?
> >
> > Thanks, I'll try it out. Do you think, its hard to implement? I only
> > need some text and images on each pdf page.
>
> The original question is not clear. Do you actually
> need to convert HTML to PDF? Or, do you have the data
> to generate the HTML, and you're now looking for a
> way to generate a PDF, instead of HTML?

In fact, I have some kind of report generation. It contains only images and 
text belonging to those images. The place of those is rendered on a normal 
WARenderCanvas through some predefined layouts, which take the given images 
and texts for a given page of the report.
The editing of those reports (i.e. changing images and texts) happens via 
Scriptaculous meaning we use Drag & Drop and an In-Place-Editor. I managed to 
get a preview view using the same layout code if I removed the generated 
JavaScripts after rending the preview component.

I now wondered whether it is possible to just exchange the renderer of the 
preview view, and it renders to latex, which can easily be converted to pdf.
The reason is not to duplicate the code for the predefined layouts... (They 
are classes, which render a page on a canvas).

Btw, what is about CSS-styles when converting html to pdf? perhaps it would be 
easier just to write the latex-code into each layout-class and thus duplicate 
the layout style... :(


> If you just need to generate a PDF with some text,
> have you looked at "SPL PDF Library". See:
tried only the tests and some those generated pdfs looked kind of ugly...

regards and thanks,
martin