Integrate electron-pdf

[msokk]

Integrate electron-pdf

[msokk]

A few initial comments:

• electron-pdf needs to be some kind of daemon process in order to add window pooling, because currently electron-pdf boots one-off Electron instance. How would you imagine the communication model between the API service and PDF renderer? Emitting messages between child process? Or a client CLI next to server CLI?
• An option to return the location of the file(s) instead of a stream - if this is asynchronous, then how would the other application check for valid content? Given that all the Electron render methods are sync, wouldn't it be easier to return file location after render

[Reggino]

@codecounselor how is .pptx generation related to Electron? IMHO the project currently aims to support Electron rendering in an efficient and complete way, but i don't see where officegen fits in. To keep stuff untangled, wouldn't it be wise to set-up a dedicated service / project?

[codecounselor]

@Reggino Good question, I had thought about that a bit too. I actually think it fits better inside of electron-pdf but you could ask the same question there. I could certainly do it that way if the community feels very strongly about not including such functionality. I just thought that for a project aiming to provide html->document export functionality that PPTX formats would be desirable.

I have learned a few things since originally opening this issue. For instance, I will likely be capturing images for the slides from the PDF file and not by using Electron to capture images. Let me get a working solution first and then circle back regarding including that in one of these projects.

[codecounselor]

@msokk It is true that electron-pdf works the way you describe, I'm working on changing that. The render-server is launched with Electron today (vs node), so shouldn't everything in electron-pdf work if that continues to be the case? I've some a bit of experimenting with communicating between parent/child but I think I'd like to avoid that if possible.

I think we are on the same page regarding the file location. I just meant that the client may request the file at a later time (after it becomes available)

[codecounselor]

Here is a snippet that should illustrate how electron-pdf will soon work:

  var exporter = new PDFExport()
  exporter.on('charged', () => exporter.runExport(input, output, args))
  exporter.start()

This should allow it to be used pretty much anywhere, and at this point I think the pooling implementation could be added inside of electron-pdf. In the render-service the charged event would start the express server, and exporter.runExport would be invoked for every incoming request.

[msokk]

@msokk It is true that electron-pdf works the way you describe, I'm working on changing that. The render-server is launched with Electron today (vs node), so shouldn't everything in electron-pdf work if that continues to be the case?

Ah, so the electron-pdf will provide library-like API for service to consume?

@codecounselor how is .pptx generation related to Electron? IMHO the project currently aims to support Electron rendering in an efficient and complete way, but i don't see where officegen fits in. To keep stuff untangled, wouldn't it be wise to set-up a dedicated service / project?

I'm not against rendering PPT(X) unless there is a simple tool converting PDF pages to PPT or the support adds some extra binaries.

[codecounselor]

Thanks for the response. I think I'm going to go down the path of creating a new npm module for PDF->PPTX conversion that can listen for events from electron-pdf as PDF files are ready (when processing a list of URLs). Perhaps when I am done with that we can review electron-pdf and see if it makes sense to integrate the two.