I am happy to release PDF Generator Extension version 2.0.0,
This is not a 1:1 replacement for the old PDF Extension, but intended more as an alternative way to generate PDF files. The usage is very simple: drop the widget in a Mashup, trigger the GeneratePDF service and you should be good to go.
Note that browsers behave different when encountering PDF files: some might open the file directly in the browser tab (Firefox) while others might trigger the download prompt. Expect that in many cases the resulting PDF will be opened in (another) browser tab.
Disclaimer: This Extension is provided as-is and without warranty or support. It is not part of the PTC product suite. As such, please do not raise any PTC Technical Support cases related to it. Instead, please open issues as instructed here. This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license.
This extension is Open-Source: it is expected that users fix bugs or implement new functionality by themselves. I will be happy to accept Pull Requests for such situations in order to embed them in the extension.
The release (including the user guide) is available to download here.
New functionality:
- added capability to create a PDF screenshot of the current browser screen.
A few notes follow regarding the PDF topic overall:
- PDF itself, as we all know, is just a file format. Like any file, it can contain anything the user would want to have in it. Therefore, defining the requirements around this file format is arguably more important. Some people want a basic table with some rows, others expect a 1:1 rendering of the mashup, and others expect to fill in a template.
- Belonging in the same area of requirements, is deciding where PDF generation should happen: server-side or client-side. This choice is directly influenced by the high-level requirements, but needs to analyzed properly.
- As you probably know already, the older version of the PDF Extension (available for reference here) is no longer working under Java 11, due to the removal of JavaFX, which was required by the component I used to render the pages, jBrowserDriver. That component is no longer maintained properly (latest release in 2018), and as such is not working properly, hence the old extension is also not working anymore. Other community users replaced jBrowserDriver with Playwright - that is also a good solution to analyze, but beware it has a long import time.
