kalinbooks

I would need more information to figure this out. It’s probably some specific issue with that plugin or the post title. There is an option on both the tool and the settings pages to include shortcode proecessing from other plugins, but of course, it doesn’t always work, because the PDF generation is running in a slightly different context than when a regular page is processed and displayed to the user.

To include a custom field from a page or post, you can use the [post_meta name=”custom_field_name”] shortcode. The Tool page already has drag & drop reordering capabilities in the My Document section.

Hmmmm…. it could probably be fixed by changing to a font that supports that character. I haven’t done much with fonts in this plugin before. You can read up about it on the tcpdf website, or I may have made a blog post about it a long time ago on my website. I think it’s relatively easy to switch to a different font if you’re willing to take the time to hack the plugin source code.

If you open kalins-pdf-creation-station.php in the plugin folder, on line 362 there is an if statement:

if($post->post_type == "page"){
$postID = "pg_" .$postID;
}else{
$postID = "po_" .$postID;
}

If you add this: return $content; inside the main block of the if statement, you can prevent it from showing the link on pages. If you put it in the else statement, it’ll prevent it from showing on everything but pages.

One of the next features I wanted to add was the ability to have different pdf templates for each category or parent pages, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have the time to continue making updates except for maybe a random bug fix here or there if people point them out to me.

Okay, awesome. I think the TCPDF upgrade included in this release fixed the .png issue, since I’m not sure what else it could be. The caption and link fix could either be the TCPDF upgrade or maybe the change I made to the way the ajax request is called, which may have been causing a problem in character encoding or something.
As for the caption itself not showing up, that is actually by design, though oddly enough, when I test it locally, the caption does show up but doesn’t flow very well with the rest of the document. Originally I was removing the caption shortcode for that reason. Perhaps something has changed with the caption syntax and you are using an older syntax that is still getting properly removed. It would take a little more work to strip out the caption text from the shortcode and place it in such a way that looks decent in the final PDF so I opted to just remove it for now since there’s a lot of other features I want to work on first.

I tried upgrading to php 5.5.12 locally and didn’t see this problem. Not sure what I can do from here. Is there anything else that’s unique about your WordPress or PHP setup?

I just tried wrapping images in a link and in a caption and both work. I even tried another png file with transparency and everything worked for me. Can I get a copy of the html code that you have in your post and a link to the image?

I just released v4.1 with a new version of TCPDF which seems to have slightly better .png support (like handling transparent backgrounds). Hopefully this will help with the png errors you’re seeing. I can’t say for sure because the png files I test with are working. Maybe if png files still fail after this upgrade you can link me to a couple of the images you’re trying to use?

For the issue with images wrapped in link or caption, I will start looking into this tonight and get back to you hopefully soon.

Yeah, I have not seen this error before. It could be your PHP 5.5 that’s the problem. I will figure out how to install 5.5 in my local dev environment and see what I get and get back to you.

I have been thinking for a while to add some kind of user-facing pdf creation system, but it probably would not be based around images. My blocker right now is trying to figure out the UX for it.

It could be a PHP error. First, try resetting the page to its defaults, then change your filename input to something simple that’s all plain text and experiment with selecting different pages/posts to make sure it’s not a specific post that is causing the problem. If that still doesn’t work, can you right click on the page and select “inspect element”, then, depending on your browser (I’m using google chrome), select the network tab and then try to create again. A new entry in the network tab should show up. Click on it and select the ‘response’ tab. If it’s a php error you will see a whole bunch of html. Can you paste that here so I can see the error?

After a couple year hiatus from this plugin I finally got back to it and updated the TCPDF engine. It seems to work faster now but didn’t fix all the issues I was hoping for, like image-text wrapping and mysterious blank pages, but it seems to have improved it. I will hopefully be making more updates in the coming weeks and months… I hope.

This I took from my post about this here: https://kalinbooks.com/2011/customize-header-footer-pdf-creation/ so I’m not positive it’ll be totally correct (particularly the line numbers) but it should hopefully push you in the right direction.

yes you can!, i′ve done it on mine, $objTcpdf->SetPrintHeader(false); $objTcpdf->SetPrintFooter(false);

this lines are to remove the header or footer and have to be written on kalins_pdf_create.php somewhere around lines 218 – 220

or search in the tcpdf.php file for –> public function Footer() { function and there you can add some text or change the black line

for example to add some text on the left side of the footer i add

$textofoot = utf8_decode(‘CONFIDENCIAL: La información aqui contenida,es para la evaluación del cliente.’);

$this->writeHTML($textofoot);

Just the other day I added a parameter to the [post_thumb] shortcode to select sizes: thumbnail, medium, large and full. Since I’m already looking at that code I’ll look into the possibility of grabbing the first attached image in the post and adding a second shortcode paramter to turn this feature on and off. If it’s low-hanging fruit I’ll just go ahead and do it.
As for your original problem of the [post_thumb] not working with featured image, are you sure the theme supports featured images and you have a featured image properly applied to the post? If that’s not the issue, can you give more specific repro steps?

Hi, sorry I missed your comment. I usually get most of my comments on kalinbooks.com. I think your issue had to do with xml support in your PHP installation. I removed the need for it, but I was never able to reproduce this problem, so I can’t be sure I fixed it. If you feel like it, try the plugin again, and let me know if it works for you. ?? thanks.