Moodle

with this new feature course creators no longer need to add to each resource the "downloadable" and "printable" version, because each student can provide to it by him/her self.

What I am talking about is the group of three icons shown, for instance, in
http://www.joomla.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=209&Itemid=42

but you can find them in hundreds of web pages.

Converting html->pdf is a nontrivial problem, unfortunately it is not possible to do with html produced by our htmlarea editor or uploaded html files

sorry If i try to answer your comment..
> htmlarea editor??? why are you talking about htmlarea editor?
I believe my next comment will be really silly.
IMO in the same way Moodle draw the html page, it should send each drawing command to the pdf lib as joomla does.

I made something quite similar using the fantastic software fop I found in http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ to create PDF starting from plain text.
Moodle should create string to send to something like FOP libraries.
Am I heretic?

well, moodle does not/can not render html - browser does that.

you either need html rendering engine on server or very simple html
we can convert plain text, wikipedia markup or other simple html to pdf, but definitely not general html with css, sorry

I trust you, of course.
I have no way to defend a different opinion.
My question is: how Joomla does?

Petr,

we could use HTMLDoc (http://www.htmldoc.org/) to produce the PDF files on the fly. There is a GPL version as well as the commercial version.

We just need to capture output with output buffering, write that to a temporary file, and the use something like the example shown at http://www.htmldoc.org/htmldoc.html#6_3_3. Of course, we need to remove the temporary file afterwards.

Saludos. Iñaki.

Whoops! It seems the GPL version doesn't support CSS and XHTML, so I don't think this is a viable solution for us.

Saludos. Iñaki.

dompdf looks like a good alternative (http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/). LGPL, CSS 2.1 support, etc. The only downside is that it requires PHP 5, though.

Saludos. Iñaki.

I would by no means object to adding this functionality within Moodle; however, I use PDFCreator and simply print any page I want to a PDF. While perhaps not ideal, I think it provides for the need. It would seem to me that the cost/benefit ratio would make this a low priority item. Peace - Anthony

> It would seem to me that the cost/benefit ratio would make this a low priority item.
1. yes, I agree, and this is the reason why I ask to plan this intervention during a planning meeting as the one you are going to have (http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=89926) otherwise it will never be faced appropriately.
2. The cost/benefit ratio move this issue in the last position but the relevance from the education view point is strongly different (in my personal opinion).
And, before closing, you are right Antony! Peace!!!

Joomla uses TCPDF.

http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/cp_dpage.php?aiocp_dp=tcpdf

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=786123

TCPDF is used by a large number of php projects such as AIOCP, Drupal, Joomla, Xoops, phpMyAdmin, TCExam, etc.

Moodle already has a "trimmed down distribution of TCPDF", tailored for Moodle in folder lib/tcpdf. Is it used for some activity?

But TCPDF isn't a XHTML2PDF converter, as far as I know.

It can convert some html (basic with inline styles afaik), but cannot be used as one general converter to PDF.

IMO TCPDF is about to "draw" PDF files using its own page description lang, but not about to convert XHTML.

Also, I've take a look to DOMPDF ( http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/about.php - commented by Iñaki some posts above), and it seems clearly more oriented to be a general-purpose XHTML2PDF converter (haven't tested it), although has some severe limitations: http://www.digitaljunkies.ca/dompdf/about.php#limitations

I'm nor really sure if we'll be able to find any library able to perform those conversions properly. Basic HTML perhaps, but ANY resource or custom content... Sincerely I doubt it (neither browsers are able to render all pages 100% Ok).

Although, in the other side, it sounds interesting, 100%.

Ciao

Hii,

Over the past 3 years I have been the administrator for multi moodle systems, and I can say without a shaddow of a doubt that this is a highly sort after feature by users (Students) of the moodle system. For instandce this week alone I have had 5 further requests for this feature. Of course I can provide help instructions for alternative methods (PDFCreator is a good one), but more often than not students are NOT particularly IT literate, nor do they find the 'print to PDF' method satisfactory, they want a easy and effective method that does not print out all the additional contents of the web page (header/footer, and other page filing html).

Sorry to say, but I strongly disagree with your comment Anthony : It would seem to me that the cost/benefit ratio would make this a low priority item

This is by far in my circumstances not a low priority due to the high frequency of requests for and complaints about the lack of this particular feature.
It really has been giving me a headache, students consistently complain about this, and about the inadequacy of the alternative options I so, so often have to reiterate to students.

My students also request that all our learning materials should be provided within a complete PDF download version for the course. For instance simply saving/printing a PDF of a page would be painstakingly repetitive to do this for all pages within only one of my lessons. Students want to be able to download a PDF version of an entire lesson. We can't spend the time updating PDF documents for any amendments or updates to our course materials, it is simply too time consuming. If each page could be reproduced as a pdf then I could provide a full download by combining PDFs, no??

This said complete PDF versions of course contents (i,e. complete PDF download of a lesson module) are by far the most highly requested feature and always have been. Please, please can we have some more active development of the print to PDF feature, it is the bane of my moodle!!! I honestly can't emphasise this enough

Thanks

Hello, no pdf conversion feature is planned, please upload the files separately.

Petr Škoda