List in Phrase in PdfTable or PdfCell

[leontalbot]

Let's consider the following :pdf-table example

(pdf/pdf
   [{:encoding :unicode}
    [:pdf-table
     {}
     [25 25 25 25]
     [
      ;; Case 1: List
      [:list {:symbol "• "} "a" "b" "c"]
      
      ;; Case 2: List in Cell
      [:pdf-cell {} 
       [:list {} "a" "b" "c"]]

      ;; Case 3: List in Phrase - BROKEN
      [:phrase {} [:list {} "a" "b" "c"]]
      
      ;; Case 4: List in nested Paragraphs in Cell - BROKEN
      [:pdf-cell {}
       [:paragraph {} 
        [:paragraph {} "Text" [:spacer 0] "Text"
         [:list {:symbol "• "} "a" "b" "c"]]]]]]]
   "doc.pdf")

When the list is inside a Phrase element (cases 3 and 4), it doesn't display correctly (no line breaks between list elements, no symbol prefix)

I took a look at https://github.com/yogthos/clj-pdf/blob/master/src/java/cljpdf/text/pdf/PdfPCell.java
but still can't figure out what to change to make it work.

Could you orient me?

Thank you!

[yogthos]

Unfortunately that code is pretty gnarly, and I wasn't the original author as it's taken from the last LGPL version of iText. I wouldn't be able to advice on this easily, and wouldn't have time to dig into this code in the near future.

[leontalbot]

Ok. Thank you :-)

For the record, the following stackoverflow issue seems really similar.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28318994/list-items-in-table-cell-are-not-formatted

[leontalbot]

I finally found a strategy to do it.

We can put a table in a table where the inner table cells has a colspan of 2 for paragraphs and a small left column with a bullet symbol for lists.

Should we create clj-pdf-tools repo to share these kind of transformation helpers?

[yogthos]

Yeah that might not be a bad idea, I've used similar tricks to get around formatting problems before myself.

[leontalbot]

Great!
I suggest we gather the snippets there:
https://github.com/clj-pdf/clj-pdf-tools
Once we feel ready, we could share this lib and invite more people to share their snippets.
Also create a clj-pdf organization and made you Owner. I would like to encourage people to become members and share stuff. Doesn't mean at all we should move clj-pdf...

[yogthos]

sounds like a plan, I can move over clj-pdf to the org as well

[Kah0ona]

I now need this as well... Will see if I can get said transformation sort of generic. Of course it's easy to hardcode it as literals, but I need it generated from (a reasonable arbitrary) HTML snippet.