We recently upgraded and consolidated our HTML editors across Lodgix to the latest version of ckEditor. This is great and allows much more flexibility when creating pretty emails that you want sent to your guests. ckEditor was also implemented within the PDF templates area of the application, replacing fckEditor which was old and outdated.

So now we have this beautiful new editor, with many new features but we are still using an old PDF rendering engine that doesn’t support most of the more advanced HTML now possible with ckEditor. What to do? The most logical solution is to replace the PDF rendering engine with something better!

The problem with this is that the PDF rendering engines are tricky. It’s just not real easy for a pdf renderer to support all the various types of formatting and styling allowed by HTML and CSS1, CSS2 and CSS3. Our old renderer works well on the existing templates we designed because we designed them specifically to work well on the old renderer.

The new renderer might cause some small (or large) styling issues on existing templates. We are going to do our best to limit styling issues, but we do need to improve the renderer to allow subscribers to create much nicer looking PDFs that more closeley match what you create in ckEditor. That’s really the issue, is trying to match as closely as possible what you see in ckEditor in the PDF that is create using the rendering engine. With our current rendering engine only simple documents will render correctly.

So be prepared, there may be some editing of existing PDF templates required to have them render correctly using the new editor. Hopefully the changes will be small, but please bear with us as we work to make the system better for everybody!