Considerations for producing PDF files in Dart

[SwarmShepherd]

Hi Guys,

(This seems only a borderline StackOverflow question...  I will rework it and re-post to SO  if I see a way to make it a straight forward question so others can search/learn from it if that should be possible. )  

What are some of the considerations for producing a PDF file from an interactive statistics/graphical session?  

Does, or will Dart directly support some way to capture VectorGraphics and Tables (Grids) to a format that can be plugged into a PDF document?

What are the current, near term, and perhaps long term plans to support PDF directly

in Dart?  And if there are such plans where can I learn more details about them so that we can keep this in mind when making (pending) choices for our graphics tools?

If a 3rd party JS library is somehow needed, I will greatly appreciate some clues on what recommended packages might be and why.  

Thanks!

_swarmii

[W. Brian Gourlie]

I'm not a member of the Dart team, but I'm pretty certain any PDF related functionaility will need to be done via a 3rd party library, either written in dart itself or through a JS interop mechanism using an existing javascript solution. 

[Bob Nystrom]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 8:57 PM, W. Brian Gourlie <bgou...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm not a member of the Dart team, but I'm pretty certain any PDF related functionaility will need to be done via a 3rd party library, either written in dart itself or through a JS interop mechanism using an existing javascript solution. 

This is my intuition too.

We plan to write a decent set of libraries to get you up and running, but building a full "batteries included" set of libraries is definitely a community-sized project. It's better for everyone if we can all build these things together.

- bob

On Thursday, October 18, 2012 10:04:14 PM UTC-5, SwarmShepherd wrote:

Hi Guys,

(This seems only a borderline StackOverflow question...  I will rework it and re-post to SO  if I see a way to make it a straight forward question so others can search/learn from it if that should be possible. )  

What are some of the considerations for producing a PDF file from an interactive statistics/graphical session?  

Does, or will Dart directly support some way to capture VectorGraphics and Tables (Grids) to a format that can be plugged into a PDF document?

What are the current, near term, and perhaps long term plans to support PDF directly

in Dart?  And if there are such plans where can I learn more details about them so that we can keep this in mind when making (pending) choices for our graphics tools?

If a 3rd party JS library is somehow needed, I will greatly appreciate some clues on what recommended packages might be and why.  

Thanks!

_swarmii

--
Consider asking HOWTO questions at Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/tags/dart
 
 

[Ruud Poutsma]

While I understand the business need of PDF's in the current world as it is (a format when printing resulting in the same physical representation), keep in mind that PDF's in itself are very unwebish and therefore very undartish. PDF is a representation of information on paper. The web represents information primarily in html format. 

You might consider designing an html page and then using @media types to achieve the same result while not deviating from the web philosophy.

If you still really want PDF's generated using dart, consider writing your own custom pdf generator, or waiting untill a pdf generation library is out and then using that.

Op vrijdag 19 oktober 2012 05:04:14 UTC+2 schreef SwarmShepherd het volgende:

[Jos Hirth]

I'd just use wkhtmltopdf [1] to render some HTML into a PDF file. If you can output HTML and if you can start other processes, you can use this option. No matter which language you're using.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/

[chris MMIX]

Hi,
  I wrote a native binding from dart to PDFlib, as part of an exercise to discover Dart language.
  Have a look at https://github.com/piif/pdf-dart
  It's just a beginning (support for a very reduced set of PDFlib features), but should be easy to enhance

Hope this helps.

On Friday, October 19, 2012 5:04:14 AM UTC+2, SwarmShepherd wrote: