I have some graphs on html which takes data from database using php function and javascripts. How can i create daily pdf with graphs on it of current date data without opening webpage and clicking on button?
The key problem is that HTML (graphics or even just text) does not translate directly into PDF. There are some libraries that will do this to a limited degree, but typically without the level of control that most people want in a PDF.
There are two very different ways to go about this, and I have used both at various times:
1 - Create a batch-mode PHP program (or other server-side language of your choice) that creates the graphics entirely server-side (many libraries available for that).
2 - Capture the page as if you were running a browser. I have used PhantomJS http://phantomjs.org/ to do that. The big advantage is that you can make use of all your existing graphics code - even libraries such as d3.
Either way, you will need to take the output and insert into a PDF together with headers, footers, explanatory text, etc. I usually use R&OS http://pdf-php.sourceforge.net/ for the PDF part, but there are other libraries that will work just as well.
try dompdf, it might help you. Here is the link
https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf
Related
I'm building a website where people can pick several pictures from a range.
I then want the users to be able to create a PDF using those pictures. However I want those pictures inserted in predefined positions and sizes in a template I have already created which will contain other predone materials (words pictures etc).
So my question :
its possible ?
Can anyone recommend a library which will satisfy my needs, I have had a look and I cant see any PDF libraries that seem to mention templates
Any guidance on where to start will be greatly appreciated.
Yes, this is completely possible.
I would recommend using wkhtmltopdf to generate the pdfs from an html template.
Another handy library for this kind of work is image.intervention
Both of these would work with PHP.
If you're working in javaScript you may want to use PDFKit
Edited: Only if you use php.
There are several libraries you can use to generate a pdf depending on what template you will build your pdf. I hardly recommend TCPDF. You can use html to layout the design you want or you can embed the image directly on a page. See an example here.
I need to generate a PDF from the current screen in my webapp. Some kind of screenshot, but I'm facing serious difficulties.
The main problem is that the view contains a grid made with jQuery Gridster; and some "widgets" contain complex elements like tables, highcharts, etc.
So plugins like jsPDF or html2canvas can't render my page in a prorper PDF. They always generate it blank.
This is how the page looks like. You can/move resize each element:
(Sorry for the CIA style, but there's business data in there)
Some ideas I came across but don't work are:
Using browser print-to-pdf feature programatically. (can't)
Use phantomjs. (but page state matters, so...)
I believe a solution to this poroblem may be widely adopted by anyone trying to generate a PDF of img from current screen in a web app. Quite an unresolved problem.
It's ok if only works on Google Chrome.
Many thanks.
EDIT:
One posible solution might be to find a way to represent the current layout status with an object and save it with and id.
Then retrieve that object via url param with the id and apply the stored layout to the inital page.
This way I might able to take a screenshot with phatomjs, but it seems quite complex to me. Any alternative?
Based on the fact that you're struggling with capturing dynamic content, I think at this point you need to take a step back and see that you might need to alter your approach. The reason these plugins are failing is because they will only work with the HTML before interactions right?
Why not convert the HTML to .pdf format from the server side? But the key part here is, send the current HTML back. By sending it back, you're sending updated static HTML back to the server to be rendered into a PDF? I've used HTML to PDF from server side before and it works fine, so I can't see why it wouldn't be appropriate here.
See this answer for details about HTML to PDF server side.
I would like to generate a PDF portfolio using JS from an HTML/CSS page on a local machine. I would use a PDF template file which includes a PDF portfolio Navigator in SWF form. I have successfully accomplished this using C# and a command line program, but can not identify the proper Javascipt components to do this browser-side or pseuo-server with Node.js. Basically, I am looking for something which will allow me to append a PDF to a new or existing PDF via configuration choices and an 'assemble' action using a JS or HTML button. iTextSharp provides the required PDF interaction functionality, but I can not figure out to run this inside an HTML to allow configuration via the HTML/CSS DOM (i.e. checkboxes, text field desciptors, etc...). Does a library with this type of functionality exist?
So you want to create a PDF using JavaScript?
On a quick google search, I found what appears to be a javascript library for creating and manipulating PDFs call jsPDF
If you want information on how to upload files with JavaScript alone, here is an article on how to do that. It also shows you how to use the file element.
For style, I recommend using a CSS Framework is you don't know much about CSS. I personally use Twitter Bootstrap for quickly prototyping things. It's quick and easy, and has good documentation. You can also use this to see how to make a form in HTML. I haven't got any good starter tutorials for HTML off the top of my list, sorry.
If you don't know much about JavaScript, when it comes to getting the options from the form, so that you can use them as configuration options, I'd suggest using the jQuery framework. It'll help you get up and running quickly enough
Note, all of this shouldn't replace basic training in JavaScript and HTML/CSS. Frameworks make things simpler, but if you don't know how to do something without a framework, you're going to have a hard time with a lot of the more complicated things. This goes for every language
I need to convert a web page to a PDF because it won't print/look correct if it isn't converted. This is because the web page is so big, that as an HTML document the browser will try and split it into multiple pages (not just vertically, which is fine, but horizontally, which is bad). Though I originally planned to do this on the server side with Django, I realized that virtually all of the available libraries were written for python2, when I was using python 3.
So my only other option is client side. The only thing I could find on stackoverflow was this: convert HTML ( having Javascript ) to PDF using JavaScript, but all of the answers were in Java, not javascript.
I think the most ideal solution would be to change the style so that it was more printer friendly rather than making it into a pdf.
If it really does have to be a pdf created with Javascript, there's a library jsPDF http://parall.ax/products/jspdf out there for creating pdfs with Javascript. You would have to write something on your own to parse the page to create a matching pdf.
If you can use php, I recommend using dompdf, which was written specifically to translate webpages into pdfs, so there would be much less work involved there. https://github.com/dompdf/dompdf I've actually used this library, and it seems decent, though it doesn't support all css styling.
I have an HTML page which has a flash chart(FusionCharts) and HTML table. I need to convert this whole thing into Excel. HTML table should be displayed in cells of excel sheet. Flash chart can be displayed as an image.
Is there any open source API that we could use for achieving this. Could you let me know what are the possible options.
Can this be done by using javascript alone.
The HTML table is relatively easy. You can download the page, parse the HTML (there are various HTML parsing libraries available), extract the table and convert it into CSV (which Excel can load), or directly create an Excel file, e.g. using Java POI, as suggested above.
The Flash part is significantly harder. There are quite a few tools available to capture flash to an image, you'd need to use one of them. This can be tricky, as Flash might be interactive, so you'd possibly have to remote-control the Flash part so it shows the right image before capturing. Hard to tell without more info.
That said, screen-scraping (which is what you're doing) is always labour-intensive and fragile. You should really push for a better interface to get your data from, it will save loads of hassle in the long run.
Just set the content type of the page to "application/vnd.ms-excel". If the html page is just a table it will open with excel and look perfect. You can even add background colors and font styles.
Try some of these content types
application/excel
application/vnd.ms-excel
application/x-excel
application/x-msexcel
Excel can convert HTML tables by default. The easiest way to force it to do this is to save the HTML file with an XLS extension. Excel will then open the XLS as if it were its native workbook.
There's a very good Java POI api that would let you do that, but it's Java.
http://poi.apache.org/
If you're on Win32 you can also use Excel's COM api, there are quite a few tutorials on the net.
I cannot offer any advice on the Flash part, but I have done HTML table to Excel many times. Yes, Excel can open HTML tables but most HTML tables out there have extraneous crap in them that can make it fragile to consistently parse the tables.
CPAN module HTML::TableExtract is a wonderful module that allows you to focus on the non-presentation specific aspects of the table you are trying to extract. Just specify the column headings you are interested in and maybe specify the title or class of the table and you are mostly set. You might have to post process the rows returned a little, but that is considerably easier than dealing with the underlying tag soup in all its glory.
Further, for output to Excel format, stick with Spreadsheet::WriteExcel rather than the OLE interface. That way, you do not depend on having Excel installed for your program to work and things go a little faster.
Make sure you specify the data type of cells if you do not want content to be changed automatically by Excel upon opening the files (another reason I do not like sending around CSV files). Use a configuration file for formatting information so that you can change how the spreadsheet looks without having to change the program.
You can always use Excel's built-in charting facilities to replace the web site graphs.
This combination has enabled me to generate pretty good looking documents comprising several hundreds of megabytes of scraped data (with logos and image links etc) using just a few hundred lines of Perl and a couple of days' work.
What you're trying to do is fragile and difficult to maintain. You should attempt to create a csv feed to fetch the data. All it takes is for someone to come along and modify the HTML and your scraper will throw up on it (probably years after anyone remembers how your program works).
Try to get CSV and image data from the original source (ie, database or whatever) and build the Excel file from that.
I will add to SpliFF's answer that when you have your data as a CSV file you can set the mime type of the page to application/vnd.ms-excel which will open the page in Excel