rodneyway / silverstripe-pdfrendition

A module that makes use of the Flying Saucer XHTML renderer project to create PDFs from XHTML pages

PDF Rendition Module

Maintainer Contact

• Marcus Nyeholt [email protected]
• Nathan Glasl [email protected]

Requirements

• SilverStripe 3.0.X
• Tidy (preferably the built in PHP tidy module, otherwise the commandline binary)
• Java >= 1.5 installed on the SilverStripe server

Documentation

This module allows users to easily create complex PDF renditions of content by utilising HTML and CSS3 to define page layouts for printing. It provides a simple extension that adds a simple action for automatically generating PDF renditions of a page, and an API for developers to generate more specific PDF renditions.

Please see http://github.com/nyeholt/silverstripe-pdfrendition for more details about specific styling tips

Installation Instructions

• Extract to your silverstripe folder in /pdfrendition

Usage Overview

• Add Object::add_extension('Page_Controller', 'PdfControllerExtension'); to your _config.php
• Add $PdfLink in your template to insert a link to the PDF version of the page
• To customise the PDF layout, create a 'pdfrendition.css' file in your theme directory and add styles specifically for your pdf. See the github wiki for some examples of how to do some common PDF based things.

Known issues

Rendition Failures

Occasionally a page won't correctly render, throwing some kind of junk back to the browser as the PDF rendition process fails. Typically, this is caused by malformed XML being sent to the renderer; for this reason everything is first passed through HTML Tidy, however in some rare cases this can still not correctly convert the raw content.

In these cases, errors will be sent through to your error log files; it will indicate the temporary files that were created, so you should first check these for XML errors. If that does not work, you can also attempt to manually perform the conversion using commandline tidy and the commandline for the PDF rendition to see if there are more verbose errors available for debugging the problem.