On Fri, Jan 20, 2017 at 2:10 PM, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi Anca, > > > On 18 Jan 2017, at 18:05, Anca Luca <[email protected]> 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. > I'm not sure we fully understand eachother... I printed to pdf with Firefox on Ubuntu the standard Sandbox.WebHome page and none of the links we have in there are actually clickable, they are plain text (in the Links section, with external links, or in the Table of contents section, with internal links). I don't understand exactly how XWikiServletURLFactory would help us control links inside the pdf itself, if the pdf is generated by the client-side software (it's true that html anchors seem to work for chrome, so that is one way of doing it, but apparently not on firefox). For the other points I would need to test more to see if they actually answer what I am thinking of.. Anca > > > * 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 <[email protected]> > 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 > >
