Yes, it is indeed something only the application can do; but it is much, much easier than rebuilding a page in a PDF library.
In my neck of the woods, patient laboratory results as selected by a nurse or doctor sometimes need to be printed as a report, and printing the HTML just doesn’t cut it. The main reason is that printing a web page is often extremely ugly, for example in your FavoritePainInTheNeck browser, lines are often split over two pages.
Ok, the oddities of the FavoritePainInTheNeck browser sound like a good reason. :mellow:
I would also mention that users - at least many of our users - would consider going “Print → Print to File → Output format PDF → OK” too technical and difficult. “Press Application Print Button → PDF” is exactly what they would want.
That is, if it were practical and feasible; I do not believe it is, or ever likely to be, at least not in a generic sense : I maintain that an application and a printed document are fundamentally two different things.
Cheers,
Charles
There wasn’t a ready screen dumper add-on and the widget was so simple to make that I wrote it quickly and threw it
in Directory
. It seems to work for me at least. Oh, and
here’s the demo
. If it helps somebody with the PDF generation, great. I believe it could have some other uses as well.
Very nice !
Can this add-on be used only with a specific layout instead of the complete screen??..
thanks!!
What about using DynamicJasper ? it has PDF output feature among others. It is working fine under Vaadin…
http://dynamicjasper.com/features/
It doesn’t work well.