Feature #13317
open
Pluggable PDF export engine
Added by Evgeny Seliverstov over 11 years ago.
Updated over 10 years ago.
Description
Redmine could support multiple PDF export engines provided in form of redmine plugins.
Administrator could choose different PDF export engines for different projects or system-wide. The main alternative to the currently used PDF export is a wrapper around wkhtmltopdf - redmine_pdf_wiki plugin. wkthmltopdf is a PDF renderer that uses an internal qt webkit browser to display provided HTML and to save it to PDF so it looks exactly as the original HTML.
I recently fixed redmine_pdf_wiki to work with Redmine 2.x and to replace standard PDF export (monkey patched wiki_page_to_pdf). I noticed that RFPDF is a plugin and it is already carefully facaded with Redmine::Export::PDF. I think it is relatively easy to support an external PDF export plugin.
Current approach is to issue PDF instructions from a ruby code. It is lightweight and safe solution but when heavy and highly accurate PDFs are needed it could be better to use wkhtmltopdf. It is a native program with several major issues but I hope they will be fixed in future.
Please check an initial discussion with Terence Miller in pull request
There are plugin which tried to work around this problem but are outdated or imcompatible.
Hower this a protypes of possible solution for this issue.
- chili_pdf is nowards imcompatible with redmine 2.x (worked for redmine 1.x) and uses wkhtmltopdf and wicked_pdf an a core patch to solve the problem, see also chili issue
2. redmine_pdf_wiki uses also wkhtmltopdf and needs passenger web server as soution for a recursion que problem and therefore settings to add "PassengerUseGlobalQueue on"
Now that RFPDF is dead and its author is using Prawn, it seems the logical way of fixing many issues with PDF export (such as #10681, #13781 and #8753) is to migrate to a better, alive PDF rendering engine, maybe Prawn.
This is a grave issue, because is some locales such as Persian (and probably Arabic and Hebrew) the exported PDF is totally garbage and of no use.
I updated rfpdf base version to TCPDF 5.1.002 from 1.53.0.TC031.
new feature¶
- RTL (Right-To-Left) languages support was added.
- HTML support improved.
Toshi MARUYAMA wrote:
I want to define rfpdf gem in Gemfile and remove sources from Redmine.
I would like to create rfpdf gem at the end of next month, and to send the PDF patch of Redmine.
- Related to Defect #8753: PDF export for Hebrew is reversed added
Also available in: Atom
PDF