Please give a brief summary of your issue: Unable to download specific versions of HTML2PDF
Please describe your issue and provide steps to reproduce it:
In our application we use the HTML2PDF module quite profusely. Previously, the binary artifacts were downloaded and added to the application’s source code, which is not the best way to handle this. Our application is a Maven-built Java application.
We were able to migrate the incorporation of the PDFNet libraries by adding the relevant Maven repository. However, we’re not able to download the HTML2PDF components in the same manner.
The only version currently available to us is the latest version (11.5.0 at the time of this writing), which may or may not work properly with our current version of PDFNet (9.3.0 … we can’t upgrade as yet b/c of the required effort to test and validate upon the version change). I’ve not found any mechanism through which I could download older versions of the module via the Apryse download area.
Can you help me figure this out?
The hope would be to pull in all the Apryse binaries through Maven such that we need not worry about binding them into our source repository, or even our specific binary, without a true version reference (this is also important for BOM purposes when delivering our application into secure environments).
Hello, I’m AiRon, an automated tech support bot While you wait for one of our customer support representatives, I can help you with your question.
It seems you are looking to integrate specific versions of the HTML2PDF module with your Maven-built Java application. Unfortunately, Apryse’s HTML2PDF module may not be available for specific version downloads through Maven repositories. Apryse typically provides the latest version of their modules, but older versions may not be directly accessible via Maven.
Some things you can try:
Check if the latest version of HTML2PDF is backward compatible with your current PDFNet version by reviewing the module’s documentation.
Consider manually downloading the desired version of the HTML2PDF module and including it in your project’s repository.
Contact Apryse support to inquire about accessing older versions of the HTML2PDF module.
Unfortunately, there is no way to integrate our modules via Maven. To make them work, they need to be specified in a folder, which is passed to the relevant SetModulePath method call.
As for getting an old version of the HTML2PDF module, I can check in with the team to see if we have any for your specific version. Just so I can get you the right version, could you confirm the exact PDFNet version, you can grab this by logging PDFNet.GetVersionString(), and the platform (Linux, windows, mac) you are running ?
We would still recommend updating to the latest as we are constantly improving accuracy, and performance, and version 9.3 is a few years old now.
Thank you for your patience while we look into this.
Thanks for getting back so quickly and not leaving me at the mercy of the bot!
Our plan is to include both the PDFNet JAR (which bundles the required binaries for different platforms) and the html2pdf “JAR” (as it were) such that at application deployment time those binaries get extracted from the application bundle and written out to a directory already added into java.library.path.
This is for a containerized application, so even if we were to do that before application startup, we’d still want to be able to fetch the correct artifact at container build time (via a maven fetch or a curl or whatnot) as opposed to bundling the binaries into the container’s git repository.
I get that we’re on an ancient version of PDFNet, but upgrading carries with it a fair chunk of overhead in terms of testing, as well as compatibility risks that we have to be very careful about assuming, etc. Thus, we can’t “just upgrade”. It has to be a deliberate choice at a moment when we’re able to execute on it.
Hence our desire to continue using as close to the exact version(s) of the artifact(s) as possible.
The PDFNet binaries are indeed available via Maven - at least from 9.3.0 onwards. I was hoping a similar artifact was available for html2pdf so we could pull them both in one go, but I wasn’t able to deduce the Maven coordinates for it (if it even was available there).
Alternatively, if there’s some other means to obtain the html2pdf binary on the specific version we want, then that’d be the best choice! Second choice would be “as close to it as possible”. Last choice would be “latest version” (see above).
