collective.sendaspdf is an open source product for Plone that allows downloading the page seen by the user as a PDF file. It also provide a form to send the page by e-mail (a screenshot of the current page in a PDF format being joined to the e-mail).
It relies on two products to generate the PDF files:
- xhtml2pdf: http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/
- wkhtmltopdf: http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
The site manager can easily chose which solution he prefers for the generation.
To install the package, you can simply add 'collective.sendaspdf' to the eggs list in your buildout. Then install it using Zope's quick installer or Plone's add-on products manager.
To install xhtml2pdf, add the following to your buildout eggs directory:
pisa pyPdf html5lib reportlab
collective.sendaspdf has been tested with development versions of pisa and html5lib. With the latest releases (when writing this README - html5lib 0.9 and pisa 3.0.33) some pages could not be rendered.
To install wkhtmltopdf, go to the projects page and download an executable version for your OS. Install it so the command 'wkhtmltopdf' is in the PATH. You can also update your buildout to automatically download wkhtmltopdf and have it used by your instance using the following recipes:
[buildout]
parts =
...
wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf_executable
[instance]
...
environment-vars =
...
WKHTMLTOPDF_PATH ${wkhtmltopdf:location}/wkhtmltopdf
[wkhtmltopdf]
recipe = hexagonit.recipe.download
url = http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
[wkhtmltopdf_executable]
recipe = collective.recipe.cmd
on_install = true
on_update = true
cmds =
cd ${buildout:directory}/parts/wkhtmltopdf
mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 wkhtmltopdf
chmod +x wkhtmltopdf
You might have some changes to do depending on the architecture you are using (this example is for the amd64 architecture)
Go to the Plone control panel. You will find a 'Send as PDF' link that sends you to the products configuration page.
This page proposes a few settings:
- the tool used to render the PDF files.
- the directory where the PDF files are stored.
- the sentence used as salt when hashing the user's emails (this hash is used to know which files a user can access)
- the name used in the mail for the PDF file.
- a default title/body for the mails.
- a list of browser for which the attachment name should not be given. Somehow, Chrome considers the PDF generated by the tool as potentially harmful for the computer if the attachment name is specified. Adding Chrome here avoids getting a warning.
For wkhtmltopdf user, two extra options are available:
- always use the print CSS to render the PDF.
- use the print CSS for a given set of objects.
xhtml2pdf always use the print CSS.
This product has been tested with Plone 3 and Plone 4. After version 2.5 (well, starting at 2.6), we'll only ensure compatibility with Plone 4 (at least in the tests).
You can find some extra doc in
collective/sendaspdf/tests.adapter.txt. It explains how to define
custom options in the request or with an adapter.
If you want to run the sendaspdf test suite, you need to add 'pdfminer' in the list of eggs in the buildout.
On Plone3, this is my configuration for running the tests (packages do not seem to be mandatory as the eggs are taken from the zeoclient section):
[test] recipe = collective.recipe.z2testrunner zope2part = zeoclient packages =
And on Plone 4:
[test]
recipe = zc.recipe.testrunner
eggs =
${zeoclient:eggs}
defaults = ['--auto-color', '--auto-progress']
environment = environment
[environment]
WKHTMLTOPDF_PATH=${wkhtmltopdf:location}/wkhtmltopdf