Send as PDF add-on in plone not working - plone

Question

I'm new to plone and im trying to get the send as PDF add on to work. I have added:
pisa
pyPdf
html5lib
reportlab
to the buildout file and have configured the collective.sendaspdf send as PDF add-on. Whenever I try click on the send as PDF option, it does nothing. Help will be appreciated.
The traceback in the error log has the following information:
Exception Value
'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 8192: ordinal not in range(128)
Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 126, in publish
Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 46, in call_object
Module jquery.pyproxy.plone, line 66, in _jquery
Module collective.sendaspdf.browser.ajax, line 56, in show_send_form
Module collective.sendaspdf.browser.ajax, line 44, in _show_send_form
Module collective.sendaspdf.browser.base, line 237, in make_pdf
Module collective.sendaspdf.browser.base, line 223, in generate_pdf_file
Module collective.sendaspdf.transforms.pisa, line 16, in html_to_pdf
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 8192: ordinal not in range(128)
When I try to install wkhtmltopdf through build out by using bin/buildout after modifying the buildout.cfg file, I get the following error:
While:
Installing.
Error: Missing option: buildout:parts
****** PICKED VERSIONS *******
[versions]
****** /PICKED VERSIONS ******
I have done everything it says in this link: https://github.com/vincent-psarga/collective.sendaspdf
I have made the following changes in my buildout file(buildout.cfg):
parts =
instance
zopepy
zopeskel
unifiedinstaller
repozo
backup
chown
wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf_executable
environment-vars =
zope_i18n_compile_mo_files true
PYTHON_EGG_CACHE ${buildout:directory}/var/.python-eggs
WKHTMLTOPDF_PATH ${buildout:directory}/wkhtmltopdf
[wkhtmltopdf]
recipe = hexagonit.recipe.download
url = http://wkhtmltopdf.googlecode.com/files/wkhtmltopdf-0.9.9-static-amd64.tar.bz2
[wkhtmltopdf_executable]
recipe = collective.recipe.cmd
on_install = true
on_update = true
cmds =
cd ${buildout:directory}/parts/wkhtmltopdf
mv wkhtmltopdf-amd64 wkhtmltopdf
chmod +x wkhtmltopdf
Can you please tell me what I did wrong?. Help will be deeply appreciated. Thank you

Answer 1

I'm the main developer of Send as PDF. One simple question: do you really need to use Pisa/report lab ?
I've added it at the beginning of the tool development but the support for this PDF generator will be dropped soon (wkhtmltopdf works like a charm and it's a bit hard to maintain both supports).
If you look at the product's README, there is explanations for installing WKHtmlToPDF: https://github.com/vincent-psarga/collective.sendaspdf
I strongly suggest you to use this tool, there's more options for it than what you would have with Pisa.
If you really need Pisa/reportlab, I'll take a look at the issue anyway ;)
Cheers,
Vincent

Answer 2

Looking over the source code I think you have hit a bug here.
The code expects the HTML being input to be a unicode string, but this is not the case for you, and re-encoding it to ASCII fails.
You'll need to file a bug report with your traceback in the collective.sendaspdf issue tracker on GitHub.