Introduction

collective.sendaspdf is an open source product for Plone that allows downloading the page seen by the user as a PDF file. It also provides a form to send the page by e-mail (a screenshot of the current page in a PDF format being joined to the e-mail).

It relies on either of two products to generate the PDF files:

• xhtml2pdf: http://www.xhtml2pdf.com/
• wkhtmltopdf: http://wkhtmltopdf.org/

The site manager can easily choose which solution he prefers for the generation.

Installing

To install the package, you can simply add collective.sendaspdf to the eggs list in your buildout. Then install it using Zope's quick installer or Plone's add-on products manager.

To install xhtml2pdf, add the following to your buildout eggs directory:

pisa
pyPdf
html5lib
reportlab

collective.sendaspdf has been tested with development versions of pisa and html5lib. With the latest releases (when writing this README - html5lib 0.9 and pisa 3.0.33) some pages could not be rendered.

To install wkhtmltopdf, go to the projects page and download an executable version for your OS. Install it so the command wkhtmltopdf is in the PATH.

You can also update your buildout to automatically download and install wkhtmltopdf and have it used by your instance. This may be tricky. Look at our own collective.sendaspdf buildout for how to do this.

If wkhtmltopdf is not on your path, you can set an environment variable in your buildout config:

[instance]
...
zserver-threads = 7
environment-vars =
    ...
    WKHTMLTOPDF_PATH /path/to/your/wkhtmltopdf

Additionally, as you can see in this configuration, the zserver-threads number has been pushed to 7. This avoids troubles with threads locks when multiple PDFs are rendered at the same time. 7 threads work fine when rendering 5 PDFs of the same page at the same time.

jquery.pyproxy dependency

We have jquery.pyproxy as dependency. It will work without it: we do not install it by default. If you install it yourself, the links to send or download as pdf will use ajax, making the interaction a bit faster and more userfriendly.

Configuring

Go to the Plone control panel. You will find a 'Send as PDF' link that sends you to the products configuration page.

This page proposes a few settings, among which:

• the tool used to render the PDF files.
• the directory where the PDF files are stored.
• the sentence used as salt when hashing the user's emails (this hash is used to know which files a user can access)
• the name used in the mail for the PDF file.
• a default title/body for the mails.
• a list of browser for which the attachment name should not be given. Somehow, Chrome considers the PDF generated by the tool as potentially harmful for the computer if the attachment name is specified. Adding Chrome here avoids getting a warning.

For wkhtmltopdf user, two extra options are available:

• always use the print CSS to render the PDF.
• use the print CSS for a given set of objects.

xhtml2pdf always use the print CSS.

Compatibility

This product has been tested with Plone 3 and Plone 4. Starting at version 2.6, we will only ensure compatibility with Plone 4, at least in the tests.

For developers

You can find some extra documentation in collective/sendaspdf/tests/adapter.txt. It explains how to define custom options in the request or with an adapter.

Testing

If you want to run the sendaspdf test suite, you need to add 'pdfminer' in the list of eggs in the buildout.

On Plone3, this is my configuration for running the tests (packages do not seem to be mandatory as the eggs are taken from the zeoclient section):

[test]
recipe = collective.recipe.z2testrunner
zope2part = zeoclient
packages =

And on Plone 4:

[test]
recipe = zc.recipe.testrunner
eggs =
    ${zeoclient:eggs}
defaults = ['--auto-color', '--auto-progress']
environment = environment

[environment]
WKHTMLTOPDF_PATH=${wkhtmltopdf:location}/wkhtmltopdf