createPDF question

By kovali - November 14, 2013

Okay I found the info in the readme.txt file... sorry.

But now I get this error message when I click the link to display the page as PDF:

/home/vdwproje/public_html/beheer/plugins/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf-i386: symbol lookup error: /home/vdwproje/public_html/beheer/plugins/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf-i386: undefined symbol: FcFreeTypeQueryFace

Any ideas what this is all about pls ??

By Dave - November 14, 2013

Hi Kitka, 

It sounds like it's related to this bug related to the wkhtmltopdf linux binary program that createPDF uses to create PDFs: https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/issues/detail?id=352

  • Can you see if the error happens even on simple pages without CSS?  Or is it just on pages with CSS?
  • If you have CSS like this loaded by your page such as this "@font-face" try and remove it, or don't load that when displaying PDFs
  • If neither of those things work, see if your server admin can upgrade fontconfig with this command: yum install fontconfig

Hope that helps, let me know what you find out.  Thanks!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer

interactivetools.com

By kovali - November 15, 2013

OK Dave thanks for your help.

I've deleted the CSS lines and now the error seems to be gone, but I still don't get a PDF page...

I think I'm having this problem with coding now:

The page I want to create as a PDF = http://www.vdwprojects.be/new/pandenDetail.php?LOT-3-80

My link to create the PDF ("Click to view as PDF"): <a href="?pdf=1"><img src="images/pdf.jpg" width="34" height="32"></a>

But then I get this URL as a result : http://www.vdwprojects.be/new/pandenDetail.php?pdf=1   ( without LOT-3-80 )

What am I doing wrong, or how should the link be coded to get the correct URL pls ??

Koen

By Dave - November 18, 2013

Hi kovali, 

You can use some code like this:

<a href="?pdf=1&<?php echo @$_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']; ?>">

To generate a link like this:

 http://www.vdwprojects.be/new/pandenDetail.php?pdf=1&LOT-3-80

But that still seems to just pause for a long time and then return HTML code when I type in that URL directly on your server.

When you go to the Create PDF Examples under the plugins menu here: /cmsAdmin/admin.php?_pluginName=createPDF&_pluginAction=examples

Do those examples work? 

Let me know, thanks!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer

interactivetools.com

By kovali - November 18, 2013

Hi Dave,

The Test Server Requirements are all fine, but the Examples return this error in Admin:

Warning: require_once(../../../lib/viewer_functions.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/vdwproje/public_html/beheer/plugins/examples/output_as_inline_pdf.php on line 1

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '../../../lib/viewer_functions.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /home/vdwproje/public_html/beheer/plugins/examples/output_as_inline_pdf.php on line 1

By Dave - November 19, 2013

Hi Kovali, 

Can you try updating the examples to have ../../ instead of ../../../ (remove one of the ../).  That error is because the plugin is expecting itself to be in /plugins/createPDF/examples/.

Anyways, the approach I'd suggest is to get a simple page working and then work from there.  So if either the "Test Server Requirements" or the examples generate a PDF than you know PDF generation is working.

So for the next step I'd recommend creating a copy of pandenDetail.php such as pandenDetail_test.php and removing large blocks of the HTML code until you can find the HTML/CSS that is causing the PDF generation to fail.  PDFs can be a bit more picky then a regular web page about coding.

If you want a hand with it feel free to email me FTP login details to dave@interactivetools.com and I can take a look at that page (email, don't post login details to the forum).

Hope that helps!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer

interactivetools.com

By kovali - November 19, 2013

Hi Dave, thx for the help.

The example is working now, after the update.

I' ve sent you the ftp settings by mail.

Koen

By Dave - November 20, 2013

Hi Koen, 

Ok, Here's a working test page: 
http://www.vdwprojects.be/new/pandenDetail-test.php?pdf=1&LOT-3-80

The line that was breaking it was this <script src="js/jquery-ui.js"></script>.  Something in that version of jquery-ui.js was causing the PDF generation to fail.  Either commenting out that line or loading a more recent jquery fixed the issue.  For the test page I just loaded the latest jquery from their site with these urls: 

<script src="//code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.js"></script>
<script src="//code.jquery.com/ui/1.10.3/jquery-ui.js"></script>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="//code.jquery.com/ui/1.10.3/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css" />

See if you can get it to work with that.  If not, create a simpler "printer page" type of page and create your PDF from that.

Also, sometimes Google Maps don't always display properly in generated PDFs.  There's a post here on how to load static map images from Google and I included that code in the test page:
http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/forum-posts.php?postNum=2215478#post2215478

Hope that helps!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer

interactivetools.com

By kovali - November 20, 2013

Hi Dave, thanks for your great support.

Somehow the new jquery code is breaking up the design of my site :(   So I will have to find a different solution.

In your comment you said:  "If not, create a simpler "printer page" type of page and create your PDF from that."

I assume I can build a simpler page with less information and simpler css and create a PDF from that, but can you show me what the link should be in pandenDetail.php to print let's say pandenDetail-simple.php ?

Thanks again,

Koen