dompdf and utf8 error
I think that's the correct place to post non qcubed stuff.
I have looked for help in different places. And though, why not try this forum. The thing is, I use dompdf to generate pdf files from html. Everything seems to work fine. Except for one specific case, where in development server, everything works. But in production, in some cases it can't handle utf8 strings. I basically have a very simple page with lots of text on it. As I understand, it tries to split up the text to fit in boxes. And it seems, that it tries to split the word exactly where I have some non-ascii char and it doesn't use multibyte splitting. The strange part is, that if I try to generate the same pdf more, it works after some tries (nothing changed from code and the content).
Has anyone seen something like that?
Sounds like a beauuuutiful bug in dompdf. Are you by chance allowing user input for the text that gets converted into the PDF? If so, people might be copy-pasting from Word, and that generates a bunch of non-ASCII characters. What I'd suggest is a pre-cleanup of the text before you pass it along to DOMPDF.
Another approach: keep trying (try/catch in a while loop) the DOMPDF until it works. Total hack, shouldn't be done on the main thread for sure. But, as a "nothing else works", it may help you.
I just noticed, that dompdf project has become somewhat active again and moved from sourceforge to google code (http://groups.google.com/group/dompdf). I hope things eill get serious and we will see another release after 2 years or so. I remember modifying the code to support utf8. As I remember, dompdf didn't support it fully.
I put my bug there, may-be someone can help me.
And why not to add functionality to qcubed, where you can render pages as pdf. Basically rendered HTML will be run through dompdf. If dompdf comes out with a new release, we might do something.
I think adding this functionality to QCubed would be great - as a plugin, of course, not as a part of the core distro. I personally would very much use it (and I actually have used dompdf in my projects in the past, with QCodo).