Symphony.

A new extension, "URL to PDF" is now available for download.

URL to PDF

The URL to PDF extension allows you to generate PDF files for a whole or subset of your Symphony page.

• Version: 0.1
• Date: 13th July 2011
• Requirements: Symphony 2.2 or newer, http://github.com/symphonycms/symphony-2/
• Author: Brendan Abbott, [email protected]
• GitHub Repository: http://github.com/brendo/urltopdf

Installation

1. Upload the 'urltopdf' folder in this archive to your Symphony 'extensions' folder.
2. Enable it by selecting the "URL to PDF" from the Symphony extensions page, choose "Enable/Install" from the "With Selected..." menu, then click Apply.
3. You can now add the page type of pdf or pdf-attachment to your pages

Usage

Please refer to the wiki for how to use URL to PDF and for further information.

Issues

This extension is relatively untested at the moment so there will be likely be bugs. Please report them as you find them on the issue tracker

Change Log

0.1 July 13th, 2011

• Initial release

Great! So have you decided against mPDF, or was thisone already finished and will an extension using mPDF follow one day?

That's cool!

Can't wait to test this. Thanks!

@newnomad I'd already done the hard yards with TCPDF and this extension was born from a client need, so I didn't have the time to switch last minute.

Eventually I'd like to support mPDF instead, or perhaps as well as TCPDF. The major issue is both these libraries are massive and are quite clumsily coded. The version of TCPDF bundled with this extension is slight modified to fix a few bugs (the patch has been sent to the main author for inclusion) and I've removed a lot of the 'unnecessary' files that aren't explicitly used by this extension in an attempt to get the repo size down.

What I'd actually really like to do is allow this to work with one of the web service based API's, be that PDFCrowd or PDFmyURL. It will always support a fallback though, because the majority of these API's require a subscription, whereas the beast libraries are free.

If anyone finds a better PDF generation library, please let me know, I'd love to expand this extension.

Stumbled accross this the other day.. would it be useful as another fallback alternative? http://joliprint.com/ nice API too http://joliprint.com/api/

How 'bout "PDF Kit" - A PDF generation library for Node.js. :)

for Node.js.

Oh.

@moonoo2 Joliprint while nice has the right insert it's logo into the generated PDF's which client's might not be fond of. I'd also be interested in the privacy policy of what happens to the generated PDF's (ie. how long they live on their server and what they do with them).

@davidhund Although I have no experience in Node.js, that library seems more suitable for creating PDF's programmatically, not 'take this and make it a PDF kthx'.

@brendo agreed, something that brands every pdf, not good. I guess I was thinking more blog posts as pdf option, where if people wanted to download a certain page of content joliprint would suffice... privacy issues not relevant then. But I take your point on privacy for pages that require it and joliprint ain't the right choice for that.

Brendo - You're right. The PDF Kit Node lib allows for programmatically creating of PDF's. It's not a converter and therefore not an answer to your question, sorry. There are, as you know, quite a few HTML to PDF converters but I'm not sure what's the best one.

Just a quick question, when sending pdf attachment with email template filter, how do I add pdf-attachment to the page type for the template, or do I not need to in this case? This example isnt working so Im not sure what the problem is.

 <div data-utp='attachment' data-utp-filename='Your tickets to the best show on the planet'>
    <h1>This will be inside a PDF!</h1>
</div>

@jeffleeder You will need to add the page type to the Symphony page that the ETF is sending. You just do this how you would normally add page types through the backend.

Keep in mind you will need to use the latest commit on the ETF repo until Rowan bumps the version. git pull origin master should do that nicely

Hmm seems I have the email template manager that could be why :) Ill have to switch

that worked

Awesome, thanks @brendo!

I just finished building an invoice system on my website that now can email nicely formated pdf invoices all with a couple clicks.

Thanks for the work on this extension, I will say that formatting the pdf was really strange as widths etc were all way off reality so I had to trial and error my way through it.

if your interested in seeing it here are a couple screens the interface isnt the best but i can work on that later, im just glad its working :)

Attachments:

Screen shot 2011-07-15 at 5.13.05 PM.png and Screen shot 2011-07-15 at 5.11.35 PM.png

Nice job! Yeah the pdf library doesn't have very good CSS support. I liken it to designing an email template and the only client is outlook 2010!

I guess I'm still confused, super excited, but confused.. what does this actually do?
Can you post some screenshots?

This extension converts a Symphony page to a PDF. You create your page as normal and then give it a pdf page type. Any visit from the frontend will then output the page as PDF.

The second option allows you to create PDF's of certain sections of your page. Our use case at work is sending order confirmation and tickets to an event to a user. This page was previously using a print stylesheet and was just emailed to users with the ETF, but as with all things email, some issues arose from doing this. Our solution now is the have the order confirmation as plain text, and the tickets are attached as a PDF in the email. The wiki has a little more detail on this.