Mostly works and can be quite useful

  • ACEkin

    (@acekin)


    10 years, 1 month ago

    Upon install you can create PDF output with no difficulty, that’s the good part. The author is willing to help and rather quickly, he even quickly implemented a couple of features I wished for, setting margins and custom footer. That’s also very good. What is maddeningly confusing and frustrating are the instructions in the admin panel. I am not sure what page size it assumes, but the footer settings did not add up to an 11″ paper height. I had to push the Y coordinate of the footer down to 287 (from default 270) because it was too far from the bottom. Plus the height of the footer, plus the minimum 10mm bottom margin is well over 279.4mm which is 11″. I believe the plugin is using European A4 size paper for output. Maybe it is written somewhere but I could not see it.

    I wanted to use the custom footer, but two problems changed my mind. Firs, I lost the page numbering. Perhaps the author will add this option in the future. The second was the way it instructed to add border(s) which I could not make work at all. Use 1: Draw box, T: Top border, B: bottom border and so on. I entered T, no border, T: no border, T:1 no border. Then I gave up. A simple example will go a long way.

    The third problem is with the custom CSS option in text formatting. I wanted to add a short text in the post to instruct the visitor to click on the icon to print a PDF but not print it in the PDF document. I was directed to surround the text in a DIV with an ID and then declare it not to display. So I did, I surrounded the text in div id=”hidethis /div (angle brackets omitted) and added in the custom CSS box:
    #hidethis {display: none;}

    But the PDF still showed the text. I tried the variants below with no luck:
    #hidethis {display: none !important;}
    div#hidethis {display: none;}

    I am sure it will improve in time with feedback. I am providing this in the hope to help improve it, constructive criticism more than putting it down. It promises to be very useful, with the addition of a few more parameters and better admin interface it could be super useful. Here are a few suggestions:
    1. Allow selecting paper size, if it is there please make it more obvious to see
    2. A simpler border selection around the footer, like four check boxes for each side
    3. Allow inserting the page number/total pages in the footer
    4. Add a feature that excludes parts of the text with the use of tokens or a particular CSS class. The icon has a class of wpptopdfenh, I even tried it around the text I wanted to hide but that did not work either.

    Thank you for the plugin, and for your help on the support forum.

    Cemal

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  • Plugin Author Lewis Rosenthal

    (@lewisr)

    10 years, 1 month ago

    Thanks for your thorough review, Cemal. However, I hope that you and readers of your review realize that many of your comments pertain to a trunk version which is in development and admittedly has much to be finished before release. It is not the current release version.

    Some items:

    1. Page size. Indeed, the default in TCPDF is A4. I have added an enhancement request in my internal bug tracker to change this to letter by default, and add an option to change it to suit. Had this been requested in the support pages, I might have been able to respond to your need in a more timely fashion. As I say, it seems to be the default for TCPDF, and the author of the original plugin on which my version is based saw no need to change it. I should also, then, add an option to set the unit of measurement, instead of sticking to the hardcoded default in TCPDF of mm.
    2. Page numbering in the footer. The default footer includes code for the page numbering. As the footer is a single “cell” in TCPDF (and remember, all that this plugin does is provide a front end to the functionality offered in TCPDF; if something does not work, it may very well be because TCPDF does not – yet – support that capability), providing users a means to specify a custom footer means providing them with the ability to create their own numbering format/content. That said, I might look at an option to append the standard footer code to whatever is specified in the footer box, but it may prove to cause more trouble than it solves.
    3. Borders in the footer. The footer options are all taken straight from TCPDF; I didn’t create them. What I need is valuable feedback from beta testers to advise what works and what does not, not simply write a slightly negative review of features and functions under development. I’m sorry that the border options don’t seem to work for you; there could certainly be bugs in my implementation, and surely room for improvement in the admin UI, but what you have seen is a first draft, not a finished product.
    4. CSS for hiding text. Sorry this didn’t work out. It may be a theme thing or some other plugin, perhaps. It seems to work in my sandbox, but that’s certainly no guaranty of universal success. I’ll have another look, and as I mentioned in the support forum, I’ll add an enhancement request to allow the text for the link to be added to the shortcode as an option, which should mitigate the need for CSS to hide it. TCPDF is notoriously finicky about which CSS it processes, and in what order.

    Again, I’m more than willing to look at adding enhancements and ease-of-use elements to this plugin. I do them as they are requested. In the support forum, you requested the ability to control the margins, and provided a use case, so I added that feature. The hiding of the text I thought should have been accomplished via CSS, as it works in my sandbox. However, I now see that this, too, should be an enhancement. However, you never requested a change in paper size, unit of measurement, border placement for the footer, or automatic page numbering as an option with a custom footer, the last two of which involve a feature under development (namely, the aforementioned custom footer). I would have been – and am – happy to add those enhancement requests to my list.

    I am thankful, again, for your thoughtful review. I only wish that you would have considered that what you were reviewing was a work in progress and not the current release version.

    Cheers

    Lewis

    Thread Starter ACEkin

    (@acekin)

    10 years, 1 month ago

    I did note your helpful stance and the generally functional nature of the plugin. A review is supposed to look at the object under review honestly, closely, and with some thought. That is my habit, I call things the way I see them, the good, the bad, the ugly. Here there were no “uglies”, a few things that needed improvement. I have no way of knowing the inner workings of programs, I was talking to the way a user sees and interacts with them. I am glad to hear that most of the suggestions I made were taken as constructive as I indeed meant. I believe that this will be a very useful and quite likely very popular plugin. Thank you again.

    Cemal

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