Wednesday, September 16, 2009

PDF Print FAIL!

I have been working on an oft requested feature, that of exporting a test plan to a printable format such as PDF. After nearly a week of headache, I give up. It seems that most of the sane sounding Perl PDF packages out there have all died long ago. PDF::FromHTML seemed really promising, but so far it doesn't seem to support modern versions of Adobe and what is worse, throws taint errors when used from the CGI. It also doesn't handle table tags AT ALL! I am not sure how layout is supposed to happen in that case since it also doesn't support CSS.

It appears there are a dozen other modules in the PDF:: space but short of spelling out each dot by hand, it seems that this is a futile effort. I am happy to take suggestions on other modules or packages. If anyone has had success with generating PDF from Perl, and preferably from an HTML template (or directly from Template Toolkit) I would love to hear about it.

In the mean time, I am making progress on rewriting XML export and import. I currently have exporting a plan with all cases and runs and importing a plan with all its cases working. Personally, I don't see a need to import runs and case-run data. But there have been several requests for this functionality. This will be a challenge though getting all the linkages right.

At this point, I am pushing for mid October to release.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

How about simply supporting an alternate "print-friendly" HTML view, capturing all pertinent content in one page? The user would have to print from their browser, leading to ugly page-breaks, but perhaps the 90% solution is good enough for your case?

Anton said...

Hi Greg.
What the status of "print to PDF" task? Do you plan to release it? It's realy important function for test management tool.

Anton said...

Dave gave a good solution i think. And realy good thing will printable version of any search or filters. What do you think about it?