[Product-Developers] Announcing collective.ebook

Malthe Borch mborch at gmail.com
Mon Feb 25 18:24:17 UTC 2013


On 25 February 2013 16:23, ida277 <contact at ida-ebkes.eu> wrote:
> Ah, now I see the dynatree, after activating something (didn't get the
> danish text) in the controlpanel.

Yeah sorry about the Danish – I was contracted to write the add-on by
a Danish company.

> It took me a while to find out that the PDF-gen-button needs to be enabled,
> too, a little bit more hidden in the 'Settings'-tab.

Yep – and of course there's other ways to do it, but Plone really
doesn't have a much better way I think. Even with Dexterity, the
content schema is sort of the easiest place to plug in such a setting.

Or `collective.panels` – shameless plug, because I wrote this add-on, too.

> Then hitting 'create PDF' returns an error message from DateTime, correctly
> blaming that the publication-date of an item returns the year '1000' as
> default value, if not set, yet, expecting '1900' as a minimum.

Oh that might be a bug, then. I did not hit it during my own testing,
but it's true that some Plone content – at least on some versions –
don't always have a correct publication date.

> I don't have a license for PrinceXML, but the optional 'render as
> HTML'-output is lovely, exactly what I was looking for to have a lightweight
> and quick possibility to generate an overview of a site's content, including
> the body-text-field.

PrinceXML is freely available, although all PDFs generated will carry
a watermark. I don't think that you can use it commercially either
way, but you can easily try it out.

It's available for most platforms. For instance, I use it on Arch Linux.

> One last pitfall: Hitting the button on a plone-site itself (the root)
> results in 'AttributeError UID'.

True. That's a bug.

> Do you think it could be fair enough easy to connect with another (free)
> converter than PrinceXML?

Sure – because it's just an executable that you configure in the
control panel. It could be `html2pdf`. The only requirement is that it
can operate on STDIN and STDOUT.

For PrinceXML, that's just

   $ prince -

I think most converters have a similar option.

\malthe


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