Solved: PDF generator update brakes the PDF output - Page 2

Fabian_Weller · 03-24-2023 02:48 AM

AppSheet actually uses the Skia/PDF m111 to generate PDF.
Sometimes when they update the PDF generator, our PDF files will be broken: Wrong pagination, wrong text size, ... > The output looks bad and unprofessional.

In some cases, AppSheet is able to fix this. In other cases there is no fix. We need to update all our templates 😳
Here is the story of what I was aware (and affected) of:

Feb 2021
Update from Qt 4.8.6 to Qt 4.8.7.
Change in the font size and column width.
No fix from AppSheet. All Templates needed to be updated.
Mar 2021 Update from Qt 4.8.7 to Skia/PDF m88.
Change in the font size and column width.
No fix from AppSheet. All Templates needed to be updated.
Dec 2021 Update from Skia/PDF m95 to Skia/PDF m96.
Change in the row height.
No fix from AppSheet. All Templates needed to be updated by reducing the line spacing.
Dec 2022 Update from Skia/PDF m107 to Skia/PDF m108.
Change in the pagination.
Fix from AppSheet 5 days later.
Mar 2023 Update from Skia/PDF m110 to Skia/PDF m111.
Change in the text alignment in columns
Fix from AppSheet more than 2 weeks later by reverting to the previous version Skia/PDF m110.
July 2023 Update from Skia/PDF m110 to Skia/PDF m114.
Change in the row height.
No fix from AppSheet. All Templates needed to be updated.

The goal is to find a way how we can prevent this in the future. Maybe by an announcement?

@Steve @Aleksi @Arthur_Rallu @lizlynch @Greg_Denton @AleksiAlkio @devingu @Roderick @zito

Greg_Denton

This is excellent back and forth, thanks @Joseph_Seddik for helping out and offering to share your template.

@Fabian_Weller I did get your files from support and took a look. Unfortunately I don't think there's a bug here, and it's impossible to guarantee pixel perfect fidelity with the transition from Doc -> HTML -> Replace Variables -> PDF.
It seems like this was a result of enabling LayoutNG Printing in Chromium, and agree with the discussion above that it was potentially exacerbated by intricately nested tables, where even a 1 pixel difference in height, margin, padding, or border would then compound enough to cause a page break that wasn't happening before.

The good news is that with this enabled, we're now caught up with the latest versions of Chromium browsers, and major changes to table layout like the above are at least in my experience fairly uncommon.

Then as a general side note: I never got to mention before, but I still think it's awesome that the AppSheet community with their PDF templates managed to uncover the colspan bug all the way upstream in Chromium, improving browsers for everyone!

View solution in original post

Fabian_Weller

This was the answer from support:

You will have to tweak your template to get it back onto a single page. https://support.google.com/appsheet/answer/11568965?hl=en#how contains some general purpose "Tips for formatting the template" which might help. Also, we suggest you to use custom margins in the AppSheet attachment settings (see attached image) if you are not already using it.

Joseph_Seddik

I think this is useful. I'm using 0-custom margins as well.