Output directly to PDF

Hello,
It would be great in V2 to be able to output to PDF a CSV (or other, but it may be more difficult).
Some of my outputs are ready for printing/distribution, and it would save extra steps to be able to save in PDF (setting column width to the longest field) ready for distribution.

Output to PDF is on the wishlist. But there are some issues to deal with:

  • fonts and styling
  • pagination (so a row isn’t over 2 pages)
  • handling tables wide than the page (ellipsis?)
  • page size (A4/letter)
  • page orientation

So it isn’t trivial.

1 Like

I agree with @admin , output to PDF is a major pain. This was our journey

  1. Creating HTML output and then using prince xml to convert to pdf . Although their examples are amazing , we couldn’t get footer working properly
  2. Using Fastreports desktop edition which can take input from csv/json and output to pdf, but the support was slow on forums
  3. Variety of python classes to achieve PDF including pyhtml , xhtml plus many more , too many edge cases
  4. AETL from etl-tools.com , they have built in FastReports sdk in their software , this is the only one which clicked and provided amazing support via forums like EDT. For each PDF output you do need to design the report and decide all thing Andy mentioned, but I guarantee, you do get pixel perfect reports.
1 Like

What sort of information do you need in the page header/footer?

I think we would just want to let the user choose paper size/orientation and font (possibly also header/footer) and do everything else automatically. You don’t want to be manually tweaking the column widths every time you output.

1 Like

Report Name , Page Number, Today’s date

Agreed ,

I talked about the process in FastReports which works on the band oriented report generator , within AETL we open and designs the output . This is an overkill for EDT where we are looking for simple Table based output in most cases

  1. Report Tab
  2. Pager Header
  3. More header options → here name of the letter
  4. Master Data where data will go

2 Likes