Important [Merged topic] J! 1.6+: PDF feature does not work

I mean the icon that is at the lower right side of this post, as you see below.

Yes i know, we still useing J1.5.

*** Topics merged ***

G'day, flozzilla, welcome to Kunena and thank you for your interesting question.

I suppose this really boils down to an issue of how useful people feel that PDF (built into Joomla) and whether it's something that Joomla should do or whether it's something that should be added into web-browers. I know that when the Joomla development team announced that PDF was no longer included in J! 1.6, the news was greeted with both disappointment and relief within the Joomla community. Disappointment that Joomla was getting out of this area and relief that a buggy, defective part of Joomla was, finally, being removed as a cause of the many problems that it had caused.

Kunena (in K 1.0, K 1.5 and K 1.6/1.7) has only used whatever was natively built in Joomla. If Joomla has the capability (as J! 1.5 has the capability) then the configuration settings in J1 1.7 will work, i.e. Forum Configuration » General » Basic Settings » Enable PDF Creation = Yes. If Joomla lacks this capability (as J! 1.6+ lacks the capability) then it doesn't matter what settings you using in Kunena, you won't have the option to produce a PDF form of a Kunena forum page.

Because K 1.7 is designed to work on all supported platforms of Joomla (J! 1.5.25, J! 1.7.4 and J! 2.5.1), the configuration option exists. This area has not changed since when the first versions of Kunena were built based on the old Fireboard forum . In other words, PDF is a "legacy" from Fireboard. As J! 1.5 will disappear and future versions of Kunena will not offer compatibility with that platform (see Kunena roadmap 2012 ) the options to create PDF within Kunena will change. It's possible - it may even be likely - that the existing configuration setting will be removed.

Insofar as there may be other Joomla extensions that claim to provide the kind of PDF functionality that formerly existed in J! 1.5 into J! 2.5.x, I cannot comment. I also cannot comment whether other Joomla extension developers (e.g. Phoca PDF ) will provide some extensibility into areas outside the creation of Joomla articles (e.g. into Joomla forum extensions, like Kunena). These are matters that you should discuss with the developers of those kinds of Joomla extensions.

In summary, the configuration setting in Kunena is there for people who use J! 1.5.x and who are comfortable with the PDF generated by Joomla for that version. In my experience, J! 1.5 PDF was bug-ridden and did not work very well with Fireboard. Nothing has changed since Fireboard was forked into Kunena.

There are PDF extensions written for many of the popular browsers today (e.g. Firefox, Internet Explorer and possibly others) and these may give you a way to generate PDF for whatever you see displayed on your browser screen. No, they're not a perfect substitute and they do have their limitation, especially if you want to create a PDF version of a topic that runs over several screens) but that's still an option for people to consider.

At this time, PDF is not a major priority item for the Kunena project. It would be better, we think, if another Joomla extension developer was willing to offer an extension that converted Kunena forum topics into a PDF document.

I hope my explanation puts things into better perspective for you and others who are interested in this subject.