Creating PDFs in Bubble can be really frustrating.
The native SelectPDF plugin is pretty limited.
There are some 3rd party plugins that can help (I’ve built a pretty popular one myself!). But they come with their own limitations:
The element you’re PDF-ing needs to be visible on the page
You have to create the PDF straight away and can’t wait until something happens
The PDF doesn’t have neat page breaks or certain elements don’t get captured properly
I’m building PDFPotion to solve these problems and finally make generating PDFs in Bubble easy.
PDFPotion gives you full control over how you create PDFs. You can build a template in any page of your Bubble app. Users can then create a PDF of that page from whatever page they’re on.
They can download the PDF immediately or schedule it for later via a backend workflow.
Check out the demo video below to see it in action:
A beta version of PDFPotion will be released in the next few weeks. You can sign up for the waitlist here.
I will also be doing some customer research calls. If you are willing to provide some feedback on what you want to see in PDFPotion, I would love to talk to you. You can email me (alex@cranfordtech.com) or send me a private forum message and I’ll set something up
Stole the words out of my mouth! Control over page breaks is critical!
I’m imagining a little plugin element that can be dropped into the Bubble pages and anywhere that appears forced a page break. That would be awesome!
I’m also curious about the ability to add recurring headers and footers, like page numbers at the bottom of the PDF, or a logo that appears at the top of every page. Would this be possible?
But the issue is when we have repeating groups that could be very long. Then, the RG needs to break if it overflows the page. e.g if cell 2 crosses the page break, the entirety of cell 2 should be put on the next page)
So, great timing. @alexcooney5 I need to create PDF invoices in our app so I need to bring in information from the database like invoice # and date, customer addresse, breakdown of fees, etc. Does PDF Creator allow for that or should I wait for PDFPotion?
If it helps, this is what I would ideally want (though I can’t speak as to the development complexity of them):
be able to add a group with specific ID or an element that acts as a page break
specify a property in the PDF generation action that determines how RG breaks are handled (clip, overflow cell into next page, put entire cell in new page if it overflows)
Additionally, though, we’d need the ability to set a recurring header and footer, as well as add page numbers. Maybe we could set these up as separate individual pages in Bubble that are separate from the main design page? Or maybe just have a way of labeling the header and footer on the design page via an ID?
The ability to generate from a separate non-visible page is HUGE and necessary for our use case. Would we also be able to trigger the generation from a backend workflow?
We’re currently using PDJ Conjuer (Vini is updating to the new API) and it’s a great plugin, but what you’re describing would open up near limitless design possibilities, which is super exciting.
