Working on some articles and not others

Phoca PDF - creating PDF documents in Joomla! CMS
dctrpl
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Working on some articles and not others

Post by dctrpl »

Hi - just installed.

The button is appearing on all articles.

However success in the actual creation of the pdf is variable.

It works on some articles and doesn't work on others. I can't see a consistent reason for this.

Does anyone have any ideas why?

All articles are lists of trivia questions. They don't use a lot of html other than <ol></ol> and links.
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Jan
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Re: Working on some articles and not others

Post by Jan »

Hi, what exactly you mean with "does not work"? Is the PDF displayed? Includes blank page? Or it is even not loaded? Or you get some error when rendering the document?

Jan
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dctrpl
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Re: Working on some articles and not others

Post by dctrpl »

When it DOESN't work a is created with the correct info above the line but zero content under the line.

At first I thought it wasn't working when articles had pictures, but this is not consistently true. I can't find the common factor between pages where it works and pages where it doesn't, so I'm confused.

Here's an screenshot of an example occasion when it fails:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Soy ... sp=sharing
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Jan
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Re: Working on some articles and not others

Post by Jan »

Hi, mostly this happens, when the article includes some specific html formatting or sometimes editors produce some hidden character which is not readable in PDF and all the content will be skip. So the way how to discover this, is to add some simple text to the article and test the creating of the PDF step by step - first with simple content then to add more text, etc. To find, which part can be in conflict :idea:

Jan
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dctrpl
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Re: Working on some articles and not others

Post by dctrpl »

Wow - that's a lot of work. I have hundreds of articles so even to find out which ones Phoca pdf is working on will take some time...

And that's before the process of trying to find out where in the articles the problem code lies.

Maybe I'll need to come back when the extension 'just works'.
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Jan
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Re: Working on some articles and not others

Post by Jan »

Hi, not sure if you did understand. It is not about Phoca PDF, but about the server and library which produces the PDF. Mostly, in such case, e.g. the server (script, text editor, etc.) produces some character (mostly hidden) which cannot be transformed into the PDF.

Example, some editors added a space with <p>&nbsp;</p> and this code included empty character which broke the creating of PDF. So if you check your article output, you can test it step by step to find the part which can cause the problem (mostly you delete an half of article and test to produce the PDF - if it works the problem is in the second half, if it does not work - the problem is in this half, etc. etc.)
Maybe I'll need to come back when the extension 'just works'.
The extension itself does not transform the html to PDF, it is made by external library. The first what needs to be done is to discover what part can prevent from working the transformation. Mostly users find it in some minutes when they test to produce simple text, then some complicated text and then hard complicated text/html :idea: And if the editor/or server/ or some another script produces some code which cannot be transformed, unfortunately, there is no way for the extension how to change it.

Jan
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