Suggestion for Topic Downloads - PDF Export

[The Old Man]

Hi,
I know the current IPB3.0 is feature locked and is looking great, but here's an idea that many may find useful for the age old Topic Download options.
The current options are Printer Friendly, Download HTML version and Download Microsoft Word version.

What about adding a PDF export option to the list of views/downloads? To save bots etc triggering the export pdf option every millisecond, you could have it appear for logged in members only in the Download Topic options, to save server resources.

[Jυra]

Firstly, to "create" PDF's you either need some PHP library (I've seen some that can do it) to do it, or server-level addons (e.g. PHP modules or some other server level application).

Given the license schemes of the various non-server-based PDF generation scripts I've seen, I don't think we'd be able to ship them.

Thus, there isn't a reliable way to add this. You can't just "create" PDFs - you need software that can do it.

Modders looking to do it, you'd need to grab one of the following

http://us.php.net/pdf
http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpag...?aiocp_dp=tcpdf
http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdf-php

Just google it - I think there's some others (I've seen ones that make you do postscript, then convert it to ghostscript or something like that).

Well Microsoft tried to add PDF support into Vista, and Adobe sent legal threats to remove it.

I personally can't stand opening .pdf files.

[Kapi]

Yeah, there'd be legal problems with IPS trying to add PDF, since its owned by Adobe. I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't care, .DOC is pretty universal in the Word Processor market.

But, follow Jura's advice!

[Swiftie]

Yeah, there'd be legal problems with IPS trying to add PDF, since its owned by Adobe. I'm pretty sure Microsoft doesn't care, .DOC is pretty universal in the Word Processor market.

But, follow Jura's advice!

Would this be purely because IPB is a commercial product whilst something like Joomla is a free?

[bfarber]

Not necessarily, it depends on the license.

That said, Zend has a PDF module in Zend_Framework, which is available for anyone to use (even us, with our license). Thus, if we were to look into this we'd most likely look into the Zend_Pdf module (which wasn't available when I made that previously quoted post).

[henke37]

I am quite sure that while Adobe more or less owns the PDF format (I don't care about the details), it is an open format and they are delighted when people makes software that creates files in their formats.

[The Old Man]

Thanks for the replies, I didn't realise PDF topic export had already been suggested.
I realise PDF may not be everyone's cup of tea, the Adobe Reader browser plug-in is installed in most browsers these days and plenty of sites allow you to export content as PDF, probably using something like the built in PDF module in Zend_Framework.

[Wolf]

Well Microsoft tried to add PDF support into Vista, and Adobe sent legal threats to remove it.

Adobe does not want Vista to *READ* PDF files, exporting them is another story.

[The Old Man]

Adobe Reader is getting bigger and bigger in terms of filesize isn't it?

[Swiftie]

Adobe Reader is getting bigger and bigger in terms of filesize isn't it?

Would this be because it's probably supporting all the new features of Acrobat Pro 9 :unsure:

[The Old Man]

Probably, yes!

[RTM]

My personal opinion is that the PDF format export function would put needless load on our IPB servers, and more importantly... Adobe Reader is most unfortunately the de facto PDF viewer and has become a massive resource hog on even the latest dual core processor machines.

It winds up taking 5-10 seconds just for the average client to fire up their reader (unless they've discovered FoxIt Reader) to open even a tiny 100KB PDF file.

From an IPB forum management perspective, it is the server resource usage that would really concern me...

Rob