20 Jan
2017
20 Jan
'17
2:10 p.m.
Hi Anca,
On 18 Jan 2017, at 18:05, Anca Luca
<lucaa(a)xwiki.com> wrote:
Interesting, however, I see at least 2-3 possible limitations:
* we will drop cover and table of contents
Actually we won’t. The idea would be to have to a Print button inside XWiki (right now we
have Print Preview) and we would add support for cover + TOC in print.vm.
* browsers (operating systems?) that don't have
print to pdf option, will
not have this working anymore
I think all OSes support this. Do you have any meaningful OS/Browser in mind? We could
still leave it as an option to use our PDF Export if users need it.
* less customizations will be possible on this PDF
(e.g. can we control
header / footer of the browser's print to PDF? Margins size, etc)
Yes we can. This is controlled by the Browser which allows you to customise this.
For the content of header/footer that’s easy, that would be the print.vm controlling
them.
* multipage pdf export (that we currently have in
multiple forms) will have
to be re-thought
Yes indeed. We would still be able to support this if we want by having our print.vm
support it.
* will links continue to work properly as links inside
the pdf ( I will
need to test - actually, I was talking about links that link to another
place in the PDF, but while testing I realized that my Firefox did not
export any link as link in pdf - internal or external - it only exported
text)
Actually that should work better than what we have now ;)
Note that we can do anything we want since we control the print.vm so we can use any
XWikiServletURLFactory we want.
* as resulting from the previous small test but easy
to generalize: the
result of this feature will start to be browser dependent .
So we control the layout completely. Then indeed it’s up to the browser to print. I don’t
know if various browser print thing differently and how much difference there are between
them.
All I know is that they’ve spent way more men/hours than we’ve done on making a nice print
;)
So again my goal in this proposal is to benefit from the Print feature of browsers,
externalise the feature as much as possible (similar to what we’ve done with CKEditor). I
wouldn’t want to drop our PDF export since it has some use cases, for example for
generating export from scripts.
I’m only referring to the basic Print option here and to transform the Print Preview into
a Print one and tune it a bit to look as nice as possible. And make the Export to PDF
optional and off by default.
Thanks
-Vincent
For the problems of Apache FOP, does anyone have any
idea what libraries do
other software use for this kind of functionality? (maybe there is a more
cool lib that we haven't found out about)
Anca
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 2:54 PM, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:
> Hi devs,
>
> We have plenty of existing limitations in our PDF export (table
> autoresize, etc) which comes from FOP and our usage of it. And it’s hard to
> improve it.
>
> I’d like to propose the following:
>
> * Promote the browser’s print to PDF feature instead of our PDF Export by
> triggering the browser’s print feature when clicking on Export > PDF in the
> UI.
> * Work on our print.css so that it has all the styles we have in view mode
> (right now for ex, info boxes for ex do not have a nice style).
> * Move our PDF Export java code out of xwiki-platform and into an optional
> extension that we move into xwiki-contrib. The use case for it would be
> when you need to generate PDF from scripts.
>
> WDYT?
>
> Thanks
> -Vincent