Phoca PDF with NoNumber's Sliders and Tabs

[oorzaak]

Hi Jan,

Another question from me. I'm using NoNumber's Sliders on some pages of this particular website. I found that the titles as put on the tabs are not included in the pdf's. The same applies when using Tabs instead of Sliders. Then the text of all Tabs are included ok but not the titles.

I asked Peter of NoNumber the same question but I did not yet receive an answer. Also, I do not know which one of you will be the one to solve this...


Kind regards, Frits

[Jan]

Hi, see the Important notice on Phoca PDF site. PDF is not HTML, in PDF you cannot run some HTML or javascript features, so html/js features like tabs etc. cannot be set in PDF document

There is a way to display plugin code in PDF but of course this is very limited (in fact to text or basic html)

Jan

[oorzaak]

Hi Jan,

Peter from NoNumber says:

Sliders and Tabs do not rely on the js to show the html.
Without javascript (so in pdfs) it should simply display the html.

Maybe you can take a look at my test/develop site where you can view the issue on this page: http://www.oorzaak-develop07.nl/stappen ... eperking-3.

Unfortunately the site is already set up with an extensive user access schema so you'd have to log in, in order to view the page:

user: test3
passwd: test123

Kind regards,
Frits

[Jan]

Hi, on that site, I see that the content of the tabs is correctly displayed in the PDF, so this seems to be OK. I don't know what you exactly expect from PDF, but did you read the IMPORTANT notice on Phoca PDF site - PDF is not like HTML, so mostly there is a success when you get plain text displayed there. This is the reason why PDF feature was removed from Joomla! core - because it is really difficult to print some content there. The success is allways to get the content in PDF, if you get some basic css formatting this is then large bonus ...

I don't know exactly what the tabs send as content but seems they don't send the headers - Phoca PDF just get the content from the article (in some cases from the plugin - but this is really very experimental settings ans getting code from plugin is very problematic) and such will be set to the PDF - it is recommended that the content will only display plain text with basic formatting - the same for plugin (in case of plugin this is really must - to print only plain text) - In PDF there is really hard decoding of basic html (and some few CSS) but it does not compute JS anyway.

The other problem can be, that the plugin does not really render the headers, but they are send to javascript which then renders them in browser - but the PDF document does not get text from browser - it gets it directly from your server - what the Joomla! article sends, this is then set in PDF.

So for now I cannot say what is really there the problem (if the header is not set in output, but in javascript, or if the Pdf renderer is not able to accept the output, etc ) To get such information, you need to make development tests, like to get information what Joomla! article features send ... and in both cases - what it sends whout including plugins and what is send with including plugins Then you can recognize, that:

a) the header is not sent by Joomla! article feature but is added e.g. as html to the browser with help of javascript methods
b) the header is sent but PDF renderer cannot manage it (in such case the TCPDF class needs to be searched and found where exactly this is skip and maybe write some new specific feature )

Jan

[oorzaak]

Hi Jan,

Thanks for your extensive answer.

I understand that rendering a pdf is not easy and I would like to emphasize that I really appreciate Phoca PDF. Also, I think that the easiest way to solve this issue is to enter the titles of the sliders/tabs into the normal article text as well as in the sliders/tabs. So in this way my issue is solved.

On the other hand, I've become a bit curious as to how this could be solved in (one of) the extensions, be it Phoca or NoNumber. Do you agree if I'd send your answer to Peter?


Kind regards,
Frits

[Jan]

Hi, yes, of course, you can send it to Peter but I can say you immediately, there is no problem on Peter's extension and I think he has no tool how to change it. It is just extension which renders HTML/JS feature which cannot be used (or very limited) in PDF.

In fact, this feature help users to have clarity of the HTML site but it cannot be used in PDF. Just image the PDF like standard paper. On paper you cannot hide or open some paragraph text, this you can do in PC browser with html/js feature. So this is exactly the problem what we are talking here - how to solve the incompatibilty between interactive (dynamic) and static media

Jan