Export: PDF for Printing

[mshiner]

The ability to export an analysis to pdf for subsequent printing would be super useful

[rpbouman]

This is an interesting request, thank you for suggesting it.

It requires a couple of things:

• pdf generation. this should probably be done with browser's print to PDF. (generating pdf from js is quite a bit of work, and I do not want to pull in a library to do that)
• You don't just want to export what's on screen; you need the entire result. Current exports manage this thanks to duckdb's copy statement. But to print to pdf, we need to materialize and render the entire result. I think this will pretty quickly hit a limit

So right now, I don't see how to deliver this.

There is of course a workaround: export to excel, and then use PDF export from there.

[rpbouman]

There is a community extension for pdf. If that runs in wasm then we could look into that
https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/pdf

[mshiner]

@rpbouman I looked at the extension and it would seem to do the job.

[rpbouman]

@mshiner that's great! Is it available in DuckDB WASM?

UPDATE: I was just looking at the example here https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/pdf#example.
Obviously this is worth a try. But my intuition is, there's no duckdb wasm version; if there is one, it's going to be huge; if it loads, then copying the query resultset is going to be a challenge, as it seems to first convert to pdf and then dump to pdf.

Anyway we'll see.