Question Header and footer on PDF reports

Header and footer on PDF reports

Recently I decided to share my findings from the family research with family members that don't want to login to webtrees and then click on links. The solution is of course to generate PDF reports that I can distribute. However, these are not formatted as I would prefer.

The xml descriptions that are used to generate reports contain header, body and footer segments. When html reports are generated the header and footer segments are used, but for pdf reports they are totally ignored. (A change that I recently suggested at least gives the document title, from version 2.0.7.)

Now I have suggestions to use the header segment also for PDF reports, see app/Report/PdfRenderer.php. The footer segment is more difficult to use but is totally similar in all reports. Therefore a custom footer is created that gives the wanted information. Formatting must be supplied according to Tcpdf rules, see tcpdf.org/examples/example_003/ . Thus TcpdfWrapper.php must contain Header and Footer functions. The result is headers and footers that are very similar to those in html reports. Examples are given in the files header-and-footer-(html,pdf)-(before,after).(png,pdf).

Report specifications
The reports are defined in xml files which are stored in resources/xml/. They contain definitions of information to put in the page headers of pdf reports. I find some of these headers too general, e.g. "Related families" which can contain ancestors, descendants, or just a closer family. My suggestion is to give the central person and the selection, e.g. "Seved Torstendahl: Ancestors" or "Seved Torstendahl: Parents and siblings". Examples are given in pedigree-report-(before,after).pdf and individual-ext-report-(before,after).pdf.

Some reports (individual-ext-report.xml and relative-ext-report.xml) have options to select different views. Changes are included to set the header information to selected person and which view was selected. Some reports have tables and the table headers were part of the page headers. That is not easily reproduced and thus the table header is moved to the first page only (relative-ext-report.xml).

References to footnotes may be included if sources are selected. However the numbers are generated one space away from the name (or fact, ...) and close to the following word. I made adjustments to move the footnote reference closer to the preceding word and away from the next. The result can be seen in the images footnote-before.png and footnote-after.png.

I also want to present all my findings which are normally included in different notes. Therefore the individual_ext_report.xml has been modified to include much more information.

I think that all these modifications are of general interest and should be included in future releases. Patch files are also included.

Hello, have you solved the problem of exporting PDF?

Yes, I have solved this.
I also have a lot of improvements to the report generator if anyone is interested.

hi, I also encountered the same problem when exporting PDF, but I am not able to solve the problem yet. Can you give me some advice?

sevtor wrote:

Yes, I have solved this.
I also have a lot of improvements to the report generator if anyone is interested.

Hello, I visited your demo and the effect is very good. It would be perfect if some garbled characters that are not English characters in the generated PDF can be solved.

Hello, I want to export the report to a PDF file. Your patch is very good. Can you provide it?

it seems that the patch is included in the first post (last of the attachments)
you need to unpack this file and open "webtrees-2.0.7.patch" file with a text editor (I used VSCode)
then you need to apply the changes stated there..
take attention to the lines added (+) and lines removed(-)

and as always... backup your data first...

HerzScheisse wrote:

it seems that the patch is included in the first post (last of the attachments)
you need to unpack this file and open "webtrees-2.0.7.patch" file with a text editor (I used VSCode)
then you need to apply the changes stated there..
take attention to the lines added (+) and lines removed(-)

and as always... backup your data first...

Thank you very much. I have seen "webtrees-2.0.7.patch" in the compressed package,
but the file seems to be damaged.

webtrees-change-suggestion.zip contains a ".patch" file, and I don't see the file itself is damaged. It needs to be applied to a clone of the webtrees git repository by the " git apply " command.

sevtor wrote:

Header and footer on PDF reports

Recently I decided to share my findings from the family research with family members that don't want to login to webtrees and then click on links. The solution is of course to generate PDF reports that I can distribute. However, these are not formatted as I would prefer.

The xml descriptions that are used to generate reports contain header, body and footer segments. When html reports are generated the header and footer segments are used, but for pdf reports they are totally ignored. (A change that I recently suggested at least gives the document title, from version 2.0.7.)

Now I have suggestions to use the header segment also for PDF reports, see app/Report/PdfRenderer.php. The footer segment is more difficult to use but is totally similar in all reports. Therefore a custom footer is created that gives the wanted information. Formatting must be supplied according to Tcpdf rules, see tcpdf.org/examples/example_003/ . Thus TcpdfWrapper.php must contain Header and Footer functions. The result is headers and footers that are very similar to those in html reports. Examples are given in the files header-and-footer-(html,pdf)-(before,after).(png,pdf).

Report specifications
The reports are defined in xml files which are stored in resources/xml/. They contain definitions of information to put in the page headers of pdf reports. I find some of these headers too general, e.g. "Related families" which can contain ancestors, descendants, or just a closer family. My suggestion is to give the central person and the selection, e.g. "Seved Torstendahl: Ancestors" or "Seved Torstendahl: Parents and siblings". Examples are given in pedigree-report-(before,after).pdf and individual-ext-report-(before,after).pdf.

Some reports (individual-ext-report.xml and relative-ext-report.xml) have options to select different views. Changes are included to set the header information to selected person and which view was selected. Some reports have tables and the table headers were part of the page headers. That is not easily reproduced and thus the table header is moved to the first page only (relative-ext-report.xml).

References to footnotes may be included if sources are selected. However the numbers are generated one space away from the name (or fact, ...) and close to the following word. I made adjustments to move the footnote reference closer to the preceding word and away from the next. The result can be seen in the images footnote-before.png and footnote-after.png.

I also want to present all my findings which are normally included in different notes. Therefore the individual_ext_report.xml has been modified to include much more information.

I think that all these modifications are of general interest and should be included in future releases. Patch files are also included.

Hi, when I use the "family-tree" module, I get the following error. How can I solve it?
 

First option: you can delete the relevant folder in your modules_v4 directory in order to deinstall the family tree home custom module.
Second option: I assume that you installed the current "master" version of this module, but you should always install the released version of a custom module (see  github.com/miqrogroove/family-tree-home/releases ). Try to install the last released version.

It seems that some words and phrases are not translated correctly, e.g. "Generation ", "She was born", whereas other are translated, e.g. "The husband died". Did you run this on the demo site? When I try it, it looks as I expect. Strange!

The family tree module requires some patches to ReportParserGenerate.php
Unfortunately they are not included in the patch file I submitted earlier. I will prepare a patch file as soon as possible!

A patch file for ReportParserGenerate.php

sevtor wrote:

A patch file for ReportParserGenerate.php

I'm very sorry, files in .patch format are a new thing to me. I have never been exposed to files with this kind of suffix. Can you publish a complete module package?

In addition, I saw on your demo site that if I export "Pedigree", the Chinese characters there are garbled (because my system is Chinese, your demo defaults to Chinese, and the non-English characters in the exported pdf are garbled) ,As shown below.

I think it may be a font problem. I remember that TCPDF has a font named "cid0jp" that supports Chinese (/TCPDF-main/examples/example_038.php).

I checked the code for generating PDF by webtrees and found that my PHP ability cannot solve the problem of garbled Chinese fonts.
Thank you very much for your reply.
Wish all the best.

 

First, I have now packaged my version of the Report folder into a zip file to be included. it was developed with version 2.1.17 but works with the demo which is version 2.1.16.
As a bonus I shall include the modules that I use quite a lot. They give the pedigree tree, a descendants overview and a history module that can give the details for ancestors or descendants in many generations.

To get chinese characters in pdf documents is more tricky and I don't know the tcpdf tool well enough. But I found that there are many tools available that can convert a html file to pdf. I tried it on the demo site by first generating a report with chinese characters and then got it translated by a tool ( html2pdf.com/ ).

sevtor wrote:

First, I have now packaged my version of the Report folder into a zip file to be included. it was developed with version 2.1.17 but works with the demo which is version 2.1.16.
As a bonus I shall include the modules that I use quite a lot. They give the pedigree tree, a descendants overview and a history module that can give the details for ancestors or descendants in many generations.

To get chinese characters in pdf documents is more tricky and I don't know the tcpdf tool well enough. But I found that there are many tools available that can convert a html file to pdf. I tried it on the demo site by first generating a report with chinese characters and then got it translated by a tool ( html2pdf.com/ ).

Thank you very much

So (a very simple) solution for   xiao  is to generate html and convert the result to pdf.
On Windows - system you can (simply) use the "Microsoft print to pdf".

By using a pdf-printer you do not need a foreign site for conversion html->pdf and you do not need the extended reports created by  sevtor  .

@sevtor: your webtrees reports are great! Thank you!

I copied them to my folder modules_v4 and replaced the original folder /app/Report by the files you provided. Is this replacement necessary? I have to repeat it always after an upgrade. @Greg: would you add the modifications of @sevtor to the webtrees core?

The question should not be "Is this replacement necessary?" but "Do the changed files disturb the current reports?" .  Then sevtor can do a pull request at github webtrees!