@levon - I can live with the plugin as it currently is for now anyway. In time I may have to look for something else if the market pushes back. My uses are predominantly financial documents and reports.
I owned and grew a couple of software businesses in the past but have not coded for 28 years. I’ve come back in early retirement to learn to do it again and I’m using bubble to help me build my next app and another business. Twice in the past, I had my in-house team build PDF generators for our software products and I know that page handling is not trivial.
Predominantly what users wanted from us in the past is akin to the sort of functionality that MS Word offers. Different first and subsequent page headers, different first and subsequent page footers. The content in those headers/footers can vary from a company logo and address (either top or bottom of the first page), to repeating the column headers on top of each page after the first page, to page numbers on all except the first page, or a table of figures (pre-tax total, sales taxes, discount, tax, amount paid…) at the bottom of the last page of an invoice, or a watermark that appears on a page but is put behind the text.
Some of those things could be achieved with bubble (e.g. the watermark) but I’m not sure how we could have the column headers (unit prices, quantity, tax rate, cost) appear at the top of the 2nd and subsequent pages if the invoice goes beyond the length of one page, and I’m not sure how we could force a table of figures to the very bottom of the last page of an invoice since we have no way to know how long an invoice will be nor how far down to push it to make it appears on the bottom of that page … not to mention ensuring it is not broken across pages which can be an issue.
The examples I give above and my personal experience, and they reflect questions I’ve seen on the bubble forum a number of times as I read threads trying to work out how to do the things myself, but please do a poll to determine demand before you invest further effort. It is not a make or break issue for me today but it is a strong nice to have.
@patricia did you think of using a repeating group that would show the headers and footers? make the cell height almost as much as the pdf output page size.
and also use plugin’s page breaks to control when the content should move over to new page.
I think this way it would be easier to implement this than integrating headers and footers to the plugin (Especially if they should contain logos and other complex things with full control over those elements)
Hope this makes sense
@biminmotion we just checked your page and see that while Bubble page size is 32 000 pixel the actual page height is 35 000 (probably because of repeating groups or other elements that get expanded). - see the screenshot below
also we don’t see any page breaks.
as for the placeholders - they work for us. Can you please retest and if you see that again please send us some screenshots
@levon If a repeating group would work then I’d be happy to try it but I’m not clear on how that could be achieved. Are you saying to have a near page size RG for headers/footers so that RG repeats for each page (each cell is effectively a new page)? Depending on if it is the first or last RG cell then the content of the header and footer would change? And then do I overlay that with the RG that contains the body text (row/line items)? If that is the approach then how can I stop the body text overwriting the footer text? Is that something that could be managed with your page break? I’m only half seeing what you are suggesting.
@vincent56 - the X indent pushes everything in from the left and the Y indent pushed everything down from the top for me. They are not margins on all four sides, rather pushing you down from an origin point on the top left. Is that not what you are seeing? Could it be the page break that doing what you are seeing on the bottom margin?
@levon your demo page is not working in Firefox. All three buttons (Convert Page, Convert ID and Convert the page with page breaks) just have a very slooooooooow progress bar which eventually hangs without delivering a PDF.
[IGNORE THIS COMMENT @levon - It is bubble’s preview mode in Firefox that is not working. Even my own app will not work in preview mode. I have to run it in live mode or use another browser. And, before anyone wanting to be helpful suggests it, I’ve opened new tabs, new windows, forced quit and even rebooted my machine twice. It appears like a problem with the latest version of Firefox v 61.0.1]
@levon have you any plans to allow us to give the ConverttoPDF a dynamic page name in addition to Current Page and Single Element? I ask because I did use this in SelectPDF and it was useful.
If it is possible to get headers and footers to repeat on pages, and to have the opportunity to have special header/footer on first/last page then I think there will be a lot of interest. It would be great to have a demo to refer to. The ability to repeat the headers on an invoice (qty, unit price, tax, price,…) when it goes over one page was the thing that people on the forum seemed to be looking to do most.
Of course, there are two special cases that need to be considered too and that is where it will get difficult I think.
FIRST PAGE HEADER: The need for a deep header on the first page because the it usually contains logos and contact details and the word ‘invoice’ or ‘estimate’ or ‘statement’ and then row headers, whereas subsequent pages only contain the row headers (qty, unit price, etc.). This first page header could be treated as just elements above the RG and not an actual header on the first page.
And the last page often contains concluding information like a table of totals (pre-tax $, different tax rate totals $, discount $, total $, paid $, owing $…), again that could simply be below the RG and not in a last page footer but that means it can’t be force to the bottom of the page.
So the easiest is solution is probably to allow a simple header/footer on pages and just have check boxes to allow users to turn the header off on the first page and footer off on the last page. I can pull together a sample document that contains the things I’ve read people trying to achieve if that would help.
Thank you for your answer, I’ll make sure that my page is under 32 000px, as I used the element selection I thought it had to be the chosen element which must be under this threshold…
For the page breaks I choose to do it by hand by leaving spaces at some places (time consuming to do but the PDF upload is way quicker without the page breaks for the client, 3 sec against 2 min). I will fill in the blank spaces with “decoration” and use the actions which hides the elements for them to be invisible on the PDF.
Any idea why some ‘styles’ doesn’t show on the PDF ? E.g : Titles which are underlined on the page are not on the PDF…
@patricia and all
we have updated the pdf demo page and managed to create a Bubble page with a header/ footer and repeating group that is carried over from one page to another. It’s a workaround but a much more feasible one than building all this into a plugin
take a look at the updated demo page here: https://zeroqode-demo-01.bubbleapps.io/page-to-pdf
(click the blue button at the top to be taken to the demo page with headers/footers/RGs)
Hope this helps
thanks!
this more than once?