[Typo3-dev] PDFlib and Typo3

[Martin T. Kutschker]

Sebastian Kurfuerst wrote:
> Hi,
> if I understand services correctly (I just read the doc) it could be 
> implemented like this:
> There will be an extension for PDF export of pages. This extension 
> instanciates a service for PDF export and passes for example the ID of 
> the page to the service. Then the service could read the page, the 
> HTMLdoc service would read the HTML and the pdflib service would read 
> out all content elements of the page and reformat them for PDF. 
> Basically, it is important that all service with one servicetype (pdf 
> for example) have the same public API, so all should have a method for 
> outputting a webpage or for outputting "custom" content.
>
> This was my understanding of it, I hope I made my ideas clear.

You don't need a service for that behaviour. Just define a pdf page type 
and associate the necessary rendering routines. See the xml types and TV 
for alternative rendering.

OTOH, you might want to use a service to provide some kind of standard 
API. SO actual implementations could work woth pdflib or R&OS. Though I 
doubt it is useful to create such an API. I reckon they are different 
enough to make the API clumsy.

>> I just browsed the R&OS pdf class faq, and I wondered if it makes 
>> sense to abstract such a complicated api as pdf generation.
> 
> Hm I don't understand your question. Do you see it as a problem that it 
> doesn't take HTML and converts it to PDF?

No. Just pointing out that there are different methods to create a pdf.

 > I think the quality would be
> much higher if we generate the content from the raw page data and not 
> out of HTML. Of course this would be quite much work to do, but 
> hopefully this would result in a high quality PDF.

Sure. You'd have to rewrite some classes. Can't say offhand which, but 
don't believe it'll work out-of-the-box. OTOH, there are some 
xml-generatign classes in the Core. They could serve as basis.

And you'd need to have an alternative style TS. If you want to directly 
render pdf neither old-style nor css-sttle will be usable.

Masi