How do I send text from TextView to 'Export to PDF'? - c++

Question

I'm new to GTK4, an open source toolkit for C++ binding. I want to send text from current TextView buffer (from a saved file) to a PDF file using GTK libraries (gtkmm4), but couldn't get anything printed out.
This is the code I have started from reading the documentation:
void MainWindow:export_note() {
auto op = Gtk::PrintOperation::create();
// setup op
cout << save_file_path << endl;
string content = editor.get_buffer()->get_text();
ofstream out(work_dir + save_file_path);
out << content;
out.close();
curr_state = edit_file;
op->set_export_filename("test.pdf");
auto res = op->run(Gtk::PrintOperation::Action::EXPORT);
return;
}
This only exports to a blank PDF, but I'm expecting text to show up on PDF.

Answer 1

It looks like you are not using any binary application to attempt conversion from text to text/pdf or more commonly binary application/pdf. You cannot simply stuff text data into a container called Test.pdf
There are simple means to convert Text to PDF, traditionally by using PostScript Printer files, but more commonly recently using a PDF printer driver direct
so start at the most basic level Hello World needs a file something like this, where the body is built up from stacked vectors or font labelled strings at X&Y co-ordinates.
Test.pdf
%PDF-1.1
%âãÏÓ
1 0 obj<</Type/Catalog/Pages 2 0 R>>endobj
2 0 obj<</Type/Pages/Kids [3 0 R]/Count 1/MediaBox [0 0 594 792]>>endobj
3 0 obj<</Type/Page/Parent 2 0 R/Resources<</Font<</F1<</Type/Font/Subtype/Type1/BaseFont/Helvetica>>>>>>/Contents 4 0 R>>endobj
4 0 obj<</Length 81
>>
stream
BT /F1 18 Tf 036 740 Td (Hello) Tj ET
BT /F1 18 Tf 036 720 Td (World!) Tj ET
endstream
endobj xref
0 5
0000000000 65535 f
0000000019 00000 n
0000000063 00000 n
0000000137 00000 n
0000000267 00000 n
trailer<</Root 1 0 R /Size 5>>startxref
399 %%EOF