PDF compatible HTML

[okiiyama]

I am wondering if anyone knows of a place to find info on what html is recognized by acobat when an html page is converted to pdf.

Thanks

 

[tgreer]

I don't think it parses any HTML at all. It works through the system's printing mechanism.



Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

Providing PostScript & PDF
Training, Development & Consulting

 

[okiiyama]

So how it prints on paper is how it should appear in the PDF?....

What is happening w/me is that some tags are not being recognized by Acrobat (I am using Acrobat 4.05).
Example
Does Recognize:
<font face="Arial" size="2">

Doesn't Recognize:
<font style="font-face: Arial; font-size:12pt">

Also, I am trying to convert pages that have a cold fusion extension, and I have found that using:
<font face="Arial" size="2"> in a html page gives me a font size of 12.
Using the same tag in a .cfm page gives me a different size font. What is frustrating is that Acrobat doesn't recognize ...size="12pt" or using style="size: 12pt"

This is a problem, when someone is looking at a webpage, converts one of my pages to pdf for printing and realizes its slightly different.

 

[tgreer]

Can you post a link to the webpage?



Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

Providing PostScript & PDF
Training, Development & Consulting

 

[okiiyama]

Yeah sure.

http://www.edinanet.com/josh/fonttestps.html

http://www.edinanet.com/josh/fonttestps.cfm

What I would like to do is to get it so that the font size on the web page will be the same as in the pdf (and possibly in Word).

 

[tgreer]

Both of these render, but I can't get the font sizes to match in Acrobat 6.0 either.

I'm not really sure what Acrobat is doing... nor could I find any documentation on their site.

It could indeed be that they are rendering some HTML. I'll try to dig into this.



Thomas D. Greer

http://www.tgreer.com

Providing PostScript & PDF
Training, Development & Consulting

 

[okiiyama]

I lost my original reply to this, but here is another maybe a little too indepth. Please let me know if Ive said something wrong.

I don’t think its possible to create a pdf that looks exactly like the web version, but I can come close. There are slight differences in sizes, but to me its pretty negligible.



This I think is the biggest hurdle:

Different browsers can possibly make web pages look different.

-I’ve been using IE6 to test the html and pdf output so someone using Mozilla may see the page being a little different.

--Further note on this, though I’m looking into it, I do not know how the page is being converted into pdf. So this could possibly affect the output PDF (though I don’t think so since I believe they will not be created on the users machine).



This is how I solved (for now) this problem:

<font face=”arial” size=”2” style=”font-size: 11.5pt”>

acrobat recognizes size=”2” which in PDF is about 11.6pt font for arial…On the web it’s a bit different in size.

Acrobat does not recognize style=”font-size: 11.5pt”, so acrobat ignores it, but IE6 recognizes it and it supercedes size=”2” on the webpage to make the fonts close in size.



Possible problems I see about this is:

PDF likes to scale things to “fit to page”, messing with the pdf margins will have some sort of an affect on the scaling. This means converting between html->PDF, since acrobat scales things, there is no absolute value to use for fonts on the web.

-I have the margins set so that the print margins on both web page and pdf are equal…(Doesn’t quite look equal though)

Also, it is important to know what fonts will not be changed by PDF when converting. Also, it will be good to know which fonts are equal, but will be converted to postscript.