Re: RPGCGI - Convert HTML page to PDF

[Scott Klement <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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