[Catalyst] Re: PDF creation in Catalyst?

[Ash Berlin]

On 22 Oct 2008, at 20:50, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote:

> * Kirby Krueger <kirbykr at u.washington.edu> [2008-10-22 20:20]:
>> Can someone give me those few lines? :-)
>
>    sub MyApp::Controller::Root::renderview :  
> ActionClass('RenderView') {}
>
>    sub MyApp::Controller::Root::end : Private {
>        my $self = shift;
>        my ( $c ) = @_;
>        $c->forward( '/renderview' );
>        if ( $c->req->param( 'pdf' ) ) {
>            my @pdf_cmd = Text::ParseWords::shellwords( $c->config- 
> >{ pdf_cmd } );
>            $c->res->content_type( 'application/pdf' );
>            $c->res->body( IPC::Filter::filter( $c->res->body,  
> @pdf_cmd ) );
>        }
>    }
>
> And in `myapp.conf`:
>
>    pdf_cmd prince -i html -s prince.css -o - -
>
> Yes, PrinceXML <http://www.princexml.com/> costs $$$, *however*,
> it renders HTML to PDF verbatim instead of requiring you to use
> completely different stuff like FOP or LaTeX – which is an
> especially big selling point if you’re looking to generate PDF
> from a CMS-ish thing where users can enter HTML content. It also
> supports pretty much all print-related CSS stuff, which includes
> control over line breaks and the like, and also provides
> proprietary CSS extensions to do things like page headers and
> footers, page numbering, and so on. For us, the effort we avoided
> of having to write PDF-specific code (the above lines are
> literally the only PDF-related code in the app) and then maintain
> it over more than made up for the price tag.
>


Sounds interesting - In fact so interesting i contemplated doing  
something similar a few months ago before decided i didn't have time  
due to major release in like 3 days time >_>


http://perlitist.com/static/talks/pdf_typesetting.pdf <-- I even wrote  
a talk about it :)

(No i've not really got anywhere with the code since. I've spent about  
a total of 6 hours on it since I gave that talk)

-ash