On Sunday 22 January 2006 10:36, Kake L Pugh wrote:
On Fri 20 Jan 2006, HERMIER Christophe
christophe.hermier@quickfds.com wrote:
But on my checklist I need to be able to produce (nice) PDF files out of the wiki pages. At first, I thought that the "Formatter" classes where the sort of thing to do that but it seems they are concerned with input format rather than ouput format.
Kjetil Kjernsmo did some stuff along these lines.
http://search.cpan.org/~kjetilk/Formatter-0.95/Formatter.pod http://search.cpan.org/~kjetilk/Formatter-HTML-Textile-0.7/ etc
Yup, I think it would be very interesting to create a Formatter for it.
However, I just reviewed our general options for creating PDFs from web pages, and the conclusion was that it was a non-trivial matter. We're skipping it, and instead we create print CSS stylesheets and have people use the client to create PDFs if they like.
The general approach that people seem to be using a bit is to use the XML they get from their web app and transform that to an XSL-FO format, which is then piped through a formatting engine, FOP: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ and PassiveTex: http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Software/passivetex/ comes to mind.
I didn't go as far as trying, but people say that XSL-FO is not nice to work with and both these engines are incomplete and buggy....
So, while I'd certainly love to see a Formatter for PDF, it is going to be a long and painful thing to do, it seems...
Cheers,
Kjetil