The latest version of Teamstudio Export (v4.0) added the ability to output Lotus Notes documents to PDF format. Export has always done a fine job of exporting Notes databases to HTML format, but many customers had been requesting the ability to choose PDF as an alternate archive format. Which sounds easy when you say it quickly. But in fact there’s quite a bit more to exporting Lotus Notes documents to PDF format than you might at first think. If you’ve ever tried to print a Notes document, you may have an idea what I’m talking about. I have a vague memory of then Lotus CTO John Landry (aka Spiderman) on stage at an early Lotusphere conference being grilled about why printing from Lotus Notes was such a nightmare. His response was along the lines of “who uses paper these days?”
It seems to me that printing anything that spends most of its time being viewed on a computer screen will always be a challenge. We’re used to resizing windows on a screen to get a better view of the data we’re looking at. If a graphic is too small, you can make it bigger or zoom in. If the text on a page looks wonky, you can usually resize the window to make it fit better. But if you want to print that same page, it has to fit and be laid out onto a finite number of pages, sized usually at either A4 or US Letter size, with nice borders around the edge.
Tables in Notes can present a particularly tough challenge. Notes tables, of course, can be nested. And tabs can be added. Have you ever delved into the server configuration document structure in the name & address book? There you will find a set of tabbed tables nested three deep. Even the Notes client can’t print its own server config docs without some data bleeding off the side of the page.
This problem, of course, is not unique to Lotus Notes. In some ways, the printing issues that people at Lotusphere were complaining about in the late 90s were merely a precursor to the exact same problems we still often encounter today when it comes to printing any given web page.
And outputting to PDF format, while not exactly the same as printing, poses almost exactly the same set of challenges as printing. The PDF format was developed in 1993 by Adobe as a way to present data independent of any application or operating system. Adobe itself was founded about 10 years earlier, based entirely on the PostScript printer language, and the first products that Adobe launched after PostScript were a set of digital fonts. So It shouldn’t be too surprising that PDF documents can be a bit persnickety when it comes to fonts.
Where HTML tends to view fonts in families, and is pretty relaxed about finding a font that’s close to what you wanted, PDF tends to get upset if it can’t find the font you asked for, and even gives you the option to embed all the necessary fonts in your document, just in case. Lotus Notes form layouts and rich text fields, of course, allow you to specify whatever font you happen to have installed, and Notes is like a web browser in that it will substitute fonts if it can’t find the exact one you specified. Also PDF, of course, requires the document to be formatted to a given paper size, just like printing.
So how does Teamstudio Export handle archiving of Lotus Notes documents to PDF format?
Export creates an HTML web site that contains the visible views in a Lotus Notes database. A user can use these views to navigate and search for documents in the database. Double clicking on a view entry opens the PDF representation of the Notes document. The actual PDF files themselves are created in an on-disk folder structure that can be used to import them into just about any content management system of your choice. But the web app that Export creates can be used as a royalty-free way to distribute the PDF archives to users.
For better or worse, we here at Teamstudio are not big fans of complex configuration screens, so we try to keep config down to a minimum. But there is some configuration that does need to be done, to accommodate the needs of the PDF format we were just talking about.
You need to tell Export whether to create PDF docs as A4 or US Letter size, for example. (We picked those sizes because we figure they will accommodate 99.9% of cases. If you know different, please let us know!) Also, if there are non-English or European style characters lurking in your databases (e.g. Japanese), then it’s a good idea to change up the default font to one that contains the characters that we’ll find in your data. The default font in Export is used whenever there is no particular font specified in the Notes document itself. But it’s also used if the font that’s specified can’t represent a character in the document.
We picked Arial as the default font of choice, since that font is available on a wide range of devices and usually works well for English and most Western European languages. But if your documents contain Japanese characters, for example, then you should choose a default font that supports Japanese, such as Arial Unicode MS. Like a web browser, the Notes client will perform font substitution automatically for you if it finds characters that are not in the specified font. PDF documents don’t have that flexibility, and will stick to the specified font, even if the character can’t be displayed. So if you have characters showing up in exported PDF docs that look like empty squares, try changing the default font to something that supports the character set of the language in the document.
When it comes to tables, we have gone to great lengths to make sure that even nested, tabbed tables are presented reasonably well in PDFs created by Export. If you do come across any edge cases that don’t work as expected, we’d like to know about them, so please let us know.
As you can tell, exporting Notes databases to PDF is quite a challenge. We’ve worked hard to anticipate all the possible wrinkles that could come up with different Notes client formatting options, but we do encourage you to get in touch and let us know if you find anything that doesn’t look right. Oftentimes it can be relatively easy to fix.
To learn more about Teamstudio Export, or to discuss any aspect of archiving old Lotus Notes databases, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!