Views PDF

The project Views PDF aims to generate faster and better PDF's. The basic approach is to use the Views module to generate the PDF. Each field of the view can draw individually on the PDF.

Motivation

There are already some PDF solutions such as Print. But these solutions use the HTML output and converts this to PDF. The disadvantages of such an integration are:

• No control over page flow (e.g. page break).
• Little or no control over page header and footer.
• You need HTML skills to change the layout.
• The rendering is slow and need a lot of memory, because it need to render the HTML.
• Complex tables make troubles.
• Vector graphics can not be implemented, therefore the printing of the document can be problematic.
• You are limited by HTML's capabilities.

The complete generating of the PDF can be controlled in the admin UI of the view. In contrast to Print you don't need any HTML or CSS skills. In addition with the use of the PDF template, you can simply control the static content of the document. This template can be created by any PDF capable tool.

Demo

Under http://pdf.use-cases.customweb.ch/ you can find a demo of the module.

Screenshots

In the attachment you find some screenshots of the settings.

About the History of the Project

I started the project in the last summer in our company. We needed this for a customer project. In the September of 2010 we deployed the module in a live environment. In December 2010 we deployed it to two other live environments.
As there are at the moment no problems left, we decide to contribute this module to the Drupal community. Therefore no big commit logs exist.

About some critics or suggestions I am very happy.