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Hi there

We’re building an ExpressionEngine website for a client and they want the ability to download page content (based on channel entries) in a PDF file. The content are detailed reports showing multiple blocks of questions with answers and scores that have been entered/answered by registered website users.

We have found various posts on the net suggesting PDF Press but our client wants to print pages that may to too complex in design (they uses a lot of floats and AP divs which multiple people have said PDF press doesn’t support or doesn’t process correctly). We want to avoid buying it to find out it’s no use to us.

Does anyone know of, or have any experience of, any good alternatives that could solve our problem? It doesn’t necessarily need to be an ExpressionEngine plugin (so long as it doesn’t require complex hand-coding in PHP as we are not PHP developers!).

Thanks in advance!

1. You mentioned PDF creation and printing. Are you trying to create pdfs for printing? If so, I’d recommend using CSS instead. Free of cost, fast, completely customizable.

2. If your client’s clients need to save data from the web site for offline use (tables, graphs) maybe just ditch the ‘complex design’ and give them what they need - a clean PDF with numbers and tables.

3. If for some reason your client thinks that the PDF has to be complex and look like a magazine cover, consider having admins upload hand-made PDFs for each entry.

4. There are web sites that offer web-to-pdf-conversion. The results are more or less aweful though. Why? For one, web sites are pixel based and you want vectors. Feeding a vector format with pixel data will not have good results. Secondly, there are things like embedded fonts, videos and other stuff that PDFs will not have access to or not display correctly. There are other reasons, but yeah.

If you want to try anyway just place this link in your template: Save to PDF

hey. There are quite a few extensions in the market for downloading page content as pdf. Please tell us more about the technical details so that we can find the perfect match for you…