Any plans for iText HTML 2 PDF?

[wesleyhales]

I looked at the iText HtmlParser some this weekend and tried messing around with UIDocument in an effort to get the parsed *.seam html as a InputStream.

Just curious what Norman's thoughts were on this and if it has been attempted. It seems that in most of Bruno Lowagies comments he doesn't have much faith in the HtmlParser that is included with iText (which is understandable) - but there has to be a viable solution, starting with...

1. What is a good way to get the generated HTML after renderResponse (open a URL connection, get it from the ViewHandler somehow)?
2. Should commons Httpclient or something else be used for the parsing?

Bruno said in one of his posts that IceFaces is using iText for their (very expensive) html2pdf conversion... so I wonder what they are using to do the parsing.

I am willing to work on this... just need a little guidance.

Thanks!

[wesleyhales]

Maybe we should render the HTML content and print it to a graphics context provided by iText. The iText library then would convert the UIDocument's draw operations to a PDF document.

I noticed a JPEG option in the source which isn't documented... What is it for?

[norman.richards]

I haven't tried it, but this looks like an interesting approach:


http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2006/10/31/combine-facelets-and-flying-saucer-renderer.html

[wesleyhales]

Awesome! - I forgot all about this article - I will give it a try and let you know.

[wesleyhales]

I got everything working with Flying Saucer xhtmlrenderer. It actually works better than PD4ML which was purchased by my company a few projects ago.

The only bad thing is the hidden input non-xhtml-compliant jsf tags - and trinidad's inline javascript. I used jtidy on the InputStream which fixed all issues but the inline js (from the Trinidad charting component).

Should this be in jira for a html2pdf feature?