Re: RPGCGI - Convert HTML page to PDF

I'm just thinking out loud...

In my experience, different browsers on different platforms don't all render the same page the same way. I often see sites that don't work properly in Opera on Linux, or work but don't look right on Firefox on FreeBSD, but look okay on Firefox on Windows. (Usually due to font choices). Or there are sites that look great in Internet Explorer, but don't look right in Firefox or Chrome.

With that in mind -- how likely is it that a program that's NOT one of the major browsers will be able to render every single HTML page properly?

The fact that it's rendering to a PDF instead of the screen doesn't change things all that much. Rendering a page exactly the way it was intended is very difficult -- unless it's a simple page, or unless you happen to be using the one of the rendering engines that the author tested it with.

So I'd be looking for a way to take the rendering engine from a tool like Firefox (since that's open source) and use it to generate PDF. (Or PostScript, which can be faithfully converted to PDF). Using a major rendering engine like the one in Firefox makes it more likely that a page will render properly.

But this is definitely not a trivial task.

Like I said... I'm just thinking out loud. I don't know what 3rd party software is out there, or how good it is.


On 2/25/2010 9:22 AM, Aaron Bartell wrote:

Hi Todd,

I have used iText on a number of occasions before and also did a small
amount of research on it for this project, but the information I am finding
is that it doesn't do a reliable job of converting HTML to PDF. Have you
found otherwise? Do you have some code you could share?

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 8:41 AM,<TAllen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Aaron,

Look into iText. It is Java-based so it will run on the i.
http://itextpdf.com/

Thanks,
Todd Allen
EDPS
Electronic Data Processing Services
tallen@xxxxxxxxxxxx