It seems perhaps the report was designed this way originally because html apparently renders jpg better than pdf in a web page. But having to run some outside conversion system that causes so much trouble doesn’t seem like a very good solution. I noticed that when you go to render a growth chart from the vitals section, you can render that directly into pdf. Wouldn’t it be a more practical solution if the button to produce a printable version of a report just rendered a pdf that compiled whatever you checked. That would make for a report in a much more usable format for electronic transfer , whether you e-mailed it, faxed it, burned it to CD or printed it.
OK, I think I figured out how to make it work. If you install imagemagick as administrator ( right click the exe file and select run as administrator), windows 7 will place the imagemagick directory in the correct path. I am not sure, but it seems you need to use the older gs871w32.exe ghostscript file instead of the newest release. Next, as you import documents into the document area, if you are making an identifying name for them such as “cardiology_consult”, you need to make sure to enter .pdf at the end of your file (cardiology_consult.pdf). Otherwise when you run a report, imagemagick is unable to convert it. It also seems you can’t go back to documents under sites/ default/documents and change them into pdf files and get them to work. You have to import them as pdf in the first place.
Again, this is not as good a solution it would seem as having reports just produce a pdf file in the first place. I guess the trick to doing that would be to get the individual pdf documents to combine under a single report pdf.
Oops, I spoke too soon. The above approach does give you a document you can view in the reports area. It doesn’t however give you a document that you can completely print. If you import a multipage pdf into documents, when you look at it under reports it creates a very long jpg without page breaks. Thus if you try to print that to either paper or file, it only gives you the first page of your pdf document. This seems to be the same under both Internet explorer and firefox. I am thinking this is probably the same under linux, because jpg’s are not multipage files.
Cverk,
This should be a new topic. If’s complex and now it’s buried in a very general subject.
Imagemagick could be used to convert from HTML to PDF just as well, but the JPG conversion is meant for onscreen viewing not really for good printing of multipage docs.
Some browsers will display PDFs, but not inline. however I could see it being used to create PDFs on the fly for download and printing.
Would be a nice feature to bundle everything into one pdf file (and also respectively offer a bundled html print out; note the html print options were all added around version 3.0 to support internationalization (supporting chinese/greek/etc. character sets for pdfs is extremely difficult while for html print outs is all supported with no work)).
Would look into options for pdf (tcpdf,ezpdf,etc) to see if the required functionality is there, and will likely need some sort of conversion (aka imagemagick) tools. Then can figure out how to do it. For example, should we convert everything to jpg images (along with breaking up the pdf into per page jpg and then add them all together to create the pdf, or should we append pdf’s to each other and convert other stuff to pdf. Ie. this will likely be a rather big, but focused project. If works well, then would have a cool mechanism that could be used elsewhere.
Thanks for showing interest in this idea. I made a seperate entry in the other forum under help and feature requests. I detailed my current work around there, which is not very efficient. Those guys seemed to show some interest as well. I am not sure what the difference of the two forums are, but I did kind of push this thread out in a different direction.
I have run a solo practice for about 25 years, so we are working out from under a literal mountain of paper. So it seems to me if you can finally get all this information in electronically, you should be able get it out easily in electronic format for use elsewhere.
Agreed would be nice to have option of placing all elements of chart into one format (both pdf and html would be the goal). Recommend placing your feature request on the ‘Feature Request’ tracker here, so this idea isn’t “lost”: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=60081
If you use a Windows web browser to run OpenEMR, you can simply install cutepdf (free download) as a virtual printer on the Windows machine and print to it. It creates a pdf file.
I have also created a generic text printer and printed to file with Windows. If you print visits (not attachments), the text file will be a little messed up with funny characters here and there, but if you open the resultant file with a word processor, it cleans up perfectly. That will give you a text file.
Similar solutions are available for Linux. See this link for a virtual pdf printer in Linux: