CSS and cfdocument issue

[taunnt]

Hello, I'm on Coldfusion 2021. When I try to load a pdf from a cfdocument it doesn't see the CSS at all. The thing I'm exporting to it has a lot of div in it, and the format is always wrong. Does cfdocument not work at all with CSS or is there a hot fix for this?

Thanks,

Chad

[Charlie Arehart]

It does handle css, though not necessarily ALL css. Two thoughts:

First, have you tried cfhtmltopdf instead? It was introduced in cf11 (in 2014) to do a better job than cfdocument. For some it does, for others it still does not. (Yet another variant is planned for cf2023, now in prerelease.)

Second, sometimes when people feel that cfdocument is failing them, it turns out to be an unexpected cause. Are you pointing to that CSS as a file, from within your html (being passed to the cfdocument)?

If so, can you create a cf page doing a cfhttp to the url you're using for the CSS file? The use cfdump of the http.filecontent variable it returns.. Does it shown your CSS? If not, the issue is not with cfdocument but instead its inability to reach that file.

Let us know what you find or think. 

[Charlie Arehart]

Oh, and to save someone else chiming in to add, there is yet another alternative that people have leveraged as an alternative to cfdocument AND cfhtmltopdf.

There's an open source project and tool called wkhtmltopdf, and one can call that from within cfml, such as by using cfexecute or a custom tag that handles it for you. See, for instance, James Moberg's post and code here:

https://www.tumblr.com/gamesover2600/125851537339/generating-pdfs-using-coldfusion-wkhtmltopdf

As well as bkbk's code here (which has aspects related to speed testing that could be removed) :

https://community.adobe.com/t5/coldfusion-discussions/cfdocument-processing-speedtest-results-and-in...

[Dave Watts]

CFDOCUMENT doesn't include CSS references, if I recall correctly. The CSS LITERALLY has to be embedded in the file. So, if you have something like this in the original HTML that you turned into a PDF ...

<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css">

... you'll need to replace that with a CFINCLUDE that has the contents of styles.css in it.

<cfinclude template="styles.cfm"> <!--- your stylesheet with the extension changed --->

Yikes!

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

[Charlie Arehart]

Dave, I don't know if that's true. (It could be, but I don't think so.) Instead, I wonder if what you experienced (if you or others observed that) may be related to the problem I shared, about how sometimes it's that the code running inside CF to DO the cfdocument somehow can't REACH the file that is named. That's where my suggestion about testing the URL with CFHTTP could help find an unexpected problem.

And there is another issue that can arise, where some problems can be solved using the localurl attribute of cfdocument, and I should have mentioned that to taunnt to consider and try also.

But on the matter of using link rel in cfdocument, it's shown even in the good ol' "learncfinaweek" page on the topic, from several years ago: 

https://learncfinaweek.com/course/index/section/Document_Handling/item/cfdocument.html

So I really do think it's supported, but again the LEVEL of CSS supported may be dated...but then over the years even some news about unsupported things can change, as Adobe updates the underlying libraries that may provide such capability.

As always, just trying to help.

[paule12345]

I remember struggling with this many years ago, but you can reference an external CSS file inside the cfdocument tag.  IIRC the key was to use @Import in the HTML to reference it.  cfdocument is limited to a subset of CSS2 and newer CSS3 stuff  won't work.

<style>
@import url(https://yourserver.com/css/yourcsslayout.css);
</style>

[Charlie Arehart]

@taunnt, there are now several things here for you to consider from a few of us. Can you let us know where things now stand? 

[BKBK]

@taunnt , Are you still looking for a solution to this? If not, I would be glad to hear how you solved the CSS/CFDocument integration issue.