Sven wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, why not use Artefact,
>https://sites.google.com/site/artefactpdf ?
>
>I haven't looked at the different approaches, but I have this natural tendency
>against native >libraries, >if we can do it directly in Pharo. That is why I
>am asking: why this road and not the other >?
Short Answer: So you know the usual "Pharo does not yet rule the world" and
the usual "designers do not
yet code in Smalltalk" discussion ;)
Long Answer:
You half-way answered yourself "if we can do it directly in Pharo ..." which
could be answered
with "not yet out of the box".
It's not that I dislike the Artefact "Smalltalk only" approach. In fact I have
contributed also to
this project (cleaned and refactored it) and use it for simple stuff.
Still there are some small issues remaining (no support to embedd fonts, etc).
Also there is
no "visual template editor" - so currently you have to "code your layout".
So very often using HTML and CSS for an easy and good looking print is much
better
and easier to do than manually code each box, line, text manually. Also there
are tons
of visual HTML Editors, HTML is easy to generate and CSS allows you to style.
If you work with Seaside then you also already have the HTML.
So far there is no HTML/CSS to Artfeact project and it would not be easy to
reimplement
such a beast (if done for all possible cases).
WKHTML uses the QT Webkit rendering engine and we do not have to reinvent the
wheel.
I fully understand that the native library is not as portable as a ST only
solution
but we already provide and use Cairo, Freetype and others with the default
Pharo release.
WKHTML is LGPL so if I understand correctly there is no conflict in using and
redistributing.
Bye
T.
