p:html ignores size in p:font

[mdesignz]

Not sure if this is a bug or unimplemented feature.  I have a situation where a user may enter text which becomes rendered in a PDF.  To allow some formatting, I'm using something like this (attributes omitted for readability)

<p:paragraph>
   <p:font>
      <p:html/>
   </p:font>
</p:paragraph>

The text in the p:html obeys the font name (e.g., helvetica, times roman, etc.) specified in the p:font tag, but ignores the font size.  I can control the font size by embedding html tags like <h4> and <h5> within the text, but this is a tacky solution.

Also, is there a way to implement a CSS within a Seam PDF file.  I believe the Excel rendering has such a feature, but not for PDF.

[mdesignz]

A solution for this is to use the RichFaces rich:editor for input, and then p:html and s:formattedText to render it within the PDF.  To embed EL expressions, I had to strip the leading slash that TinyMCE uses to escape the # prior to doing an EL evaluation, but it seems to be working well.

[norman]

p:html is really limited.  If anyone has ideas on how to make it work better or want to contribute some code to make it a bit more useful, I'm quite open. 

[nickarls]

We could check if the Excel CSS could be used in PDF generation since it shares a lot of similarities regarding architechture and delivery mechanism...

[mdesignz]

Having the CSS available to the PDF would be very helpful.

[fr.evrard]

I've found a workaround for this restriction, you shouldn't use the <p:font> implementation outside an <p:html> tag from seam in this case, but you should use a html 'font' tag inside the <p:html> as follows :

<p:paragraph alignment="right">
  <p:html>
    <font size="10px" face="Arial" style="font-weight:bold;">
      <h:outputText value="#{myBean.dateExport}">
        <s:convertDateTime type="date" dateStyle="short" pattern="#{messages['pdf.document.date.pattern']}"/>
      </h:outputText>
  </font>
  </p:html>
</p:paragraph>

[mdesignz]

The problem with this is the TinyMCE component used in Richfaces doesn't generate html text like you have shown above.  It uses relative font sizing like:  font: small, which is why it would be great to have some way to reference a CSS much like the Excel tags allow.