This question about Using an extension: Answered

Problems when GenPDFAddOn used recursively

I'm trying to use the GenPDFAddOn to generate topic documentation recursively. I'm using TWiki but I'm very open to moving to Foswiki because this is a must for our use. Our experience is it works fine on one page but if we turn on recursion to take in a topic across several pages - it puts out a pdf that is corrupt.

  • Is anyone using GenPDFAddOn with topic recursion turned on successfully with Foswiki? If you are - did you have a similar problem and how did you solve it?
  • It appears that there have been recent updates to the package for Foswiki that have not been also applied to TWiki (which is fine) so my interest is for recent versions of Foswiki and the GenPDFAddOn. I don't know how much time was available to do testing so generally I'd like to hear from someone who has used it in the field with Foswiki and is either having success - or not. Thanks!
-- MichaelDunham - 08 May 2009

I did do some testing of recursion with the Foswiki version. The recursion code was rewritten to use the %SEARCH macro internally to find topic children instead of reading the disk directly. However I've noticed that depending upon the number of topics included in the overall collection sometimes htmldoc does have some trouble.

Have you examined the "corrupt" PDF? Could it actually be error messages that ended up in the PDF contents? This might give you some hint as to what is going on. As I recall, in the version on TWiki, there were some conditions where errors could get written to the PDF file. However my recollection is a bit hazy.

-- GeorgeClark - 09 May 2009

I couldn't get it to work with TWiki either, but it may be fixed in Foswiki. See Tasks.Item5730 for some details.

-- SeanMorgan - 12 May 2009

Just want to report that we have installed and tested - it is working fine with Foswiki! We're switching over. I want to let anyone reseaching this topic know that overall the documentation, testing and operation of Foswiki is better than TWiki. No offense to anyone - but this routine was critical for our purposes and having it work "out of the box" was key to making the change. Thanks to everyone!

-- MichaelDunham - 13 May 2009

I'm sure there are several people around here who will be glad to read that. Now I'll have to take to take the leap smile

-- SeanMorgan - 13 May 2009

QuestionForm edit

Subject Using an extension
Extension GenPDFAddOn
Version TWikiRelease04x03x00
Status Answered
Topic revision: r6 - 01 Dec 2009, GeorgeClark
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