[Catalyst] Should I create a new view for rendering a pdf in browser?

[Tomas Doran]

On 9 Nov 2011, at 14:34, Steve wrote:
> My question is fairly straightforward - If I want to render a pdf in  
> a browser, should I create a new Catalyst View?

Yes. In a perfect world, you'd just say $c->stash( current_view =>  
'PDF' ) (and set a filename?) to make a pdf...

>
> The background on this is that we think that rather than rendering  
> an HTML version of these reports, and subsequently converting them  
> to pdf, just create the pdf on the fly and render it in the browser.
>
> Extra credit for recommendations on pdf tools for this type of  
> thing.  We've looked at PDF::Create, PDF::API2, PDF::Reuse, and also  
> Prince (if we decide to convert from HTML).

Depends how dirty you want to be :_)

Doing something 'proper' with one of these (or also, take your XHTML,  
apply XSLT => docbook, then make a pdf?) totally works, and if you're  
prepared to put the effort in, you can make really nice documents..

But _if_ you can deal with something ugly but workable - then just  
subclass your HTML view, after process write $c->req->body out to a  
tempfile and run html2ps | ps2pdf on it! (Then read that back in and  
replace the body) This is really dirty (and kinda slow for big pages),  
but with a few appropriate options and some CSS to cut out the bits  
that shouldn't be in the pdf - it works well..

I use this technique for all of our invoices, as I don't really care  
how they look :)

Cheers
t0m