Export to PDF with iText

It is important to be able to export project data to some pritable format. PDF export feature appeared in GanttProject at the very early days, and it is one of the most popular features in our product. However, there is a number of problems with PDF export implementation in GP. The most important is probably this landscape export bug which is difficult to reproduce yet is really annoying when it appears. It is a bug in Apache FOP library which GP uses for PDF renderig and which had no updates for years.

A few weeks ago I started playing with iText library and the second build of GanttProject 2.0.10 which was published on Friday includes an experimental plugin which exports to PDF using iText. My opinion is that it is just better than our traditional PDFexport. It is faster, it produces more visually appealing documents, it allows for scalable graphics rendering, and it doesn't suffer from that "No meaningful layout" problem in landscape mode (which is now default). Besides, now you can choose document page format and substitute fonts if you don't have those specified in iText export theme.


I plan to work on iText based export a little bit more and ship its beta version with GanttProject 2.0.10 in addition to FOP based. After that, its development will continue in Loire code where it will replace FOP export completely.

Fix for Polish translation

In the last releases of GanttProject (starting from GP 2.0.7) Polish translation was broken . Choosing "Polski" in the language settings didn't work and even manual editing of the options file didn't help. The reason was one missing character in the translation file.

The fix was submitted to our SVN repository on Google Code Hosting and will be included into GP 2.0.10. If you don't want to wait until 2.0.10, just open  

$GP_HOME/plugins/net.sourceforge.ganttproject_2.0.0/data/resources/language/i18n_pl.properties

in any text editor ($GP_HOME is a directory where GanttProject is installed on your machine), find  

refresh=Od\u015bwie\u017

and append 'c' at the end of that line, so that it becomes

refresh=Od\u015bwie\u017c

SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards

SourceForge started the 4th Community Choice Awards contest. You can nominate GanttProject clicking this image:

Kostenfreier E-Workshop "GanttProject"

Knut Harms informed me about the electronic materials for learning GanttProject which are available in German here:


http://www.schulprozesse.de/content/view/87/1/

Materials are free for personal use. I don't speak German but Google Translate did a good job and translated this page.


PDF file is available on this link:

http://www.harms-oldenburg.de/schulprozesse/component/option,com_docman/task,doc_download/gid,45/Itemid,33/

GanttProject.biz: now with Google App Engine!

April 12 becomes a day of great launches for me.

48 years ago Soviet engineers launched Vostok-1 spacecraft which carried Yury Gagarin onboard  and was powered by six liquid-fueled engines. Gagarin's flight was just 108 minutes long, but it made the Universe closer to the millions of people.

Since that time many Soviet and now Russian people celebrate Cosmonautics Day. I admit that it is one of my favorite holidays. This April I celebrate it with launching an updated GanttProject.biz, which now is also powered by an engine. Google App Engine. 

Its uptime now is about 20 hours and it is feeling good. I hope that this launch will eventually make the universe of information closer to hundreds of GanttProject users. Stay tuned!

GanttProject FAQ

Do you have a roadmap or a release schedule?

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No, we don't have any roadmap. We continue releasing maintenance updates of GP 2.0 and develop the next major update named GanttProject Loire. Nobody knows when Loire will be released. However, everyone is welcome to play with milestone builds (M3 is the latest one) and track the progress reading our blog.


Is it possible to use hours as task duration?

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This feature will appear in Loire. You can download an experimental unstable milestone build GanttProject Loire M3 and play with hours right now.


Is it possible to change weekend days?

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You can setup weekend days when you create a new project. If you have already created a big project and discovered that weekend days are not those you wished, you may create a new project and import data from the old one.


My project is two years long and doesn't fit in GanttProject window. What can I do?

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Try zooming out using toolbar buttons. If on the minimal zoom level your project still doesn't fit, bad luck. We're aware of the "long projects" problem and will be working on it.


Landscape PDF export reports "No meaningful layout" error.

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Yes, it happens. Not always, but often enough to be annoying. It is a problem of PDF rendering library which we use, but you probably don't care whose problem it is. Okay, we're working on using another library which doesn't suffer from this. Stay tuned!


Can GanttProject do resource leveling?

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No.

GanttProject in Linux Format#116

Linux Format published a review of five project planning applications for Linux in its March issue. The review includes GanttProject, OpenProj, TaskJuggler, KPlato and Planner. It is not very deep, but well written. The author even composed his own text instead of copying phrases and images from our website. Respect :)