Table borders do not render or print consistently

[Jacob Wegner]

I'm having trouble with PDFs generated by z3c.rml on both Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and Mac OS X 10.8.2 (Mountain Lion).

rml-examples-008 should render borders around several tables. When I open both the expected PDF (included with the package) and the PDF generated by running the tests on my machine, I cannot see the borders at 100% zoom level in Apple's Preview. If I zoom out, I can see the borders.

I can see the borders in Acrobat Reader from the expected and output PDFs, but when I print them to several different printers (HP inkjet, Brother laser), the borders do not appear.

The "official" PDF from the ReportLab website shows the borders at any zoom level in either Preview or Reader, and they print just fine.

I tried generating a similar PDF using trml2pdf that was consistent with what I saw in the ReportLab folder; borders were visible at any zoom level and did appear on the print out.

Has anyone else reported this type of behavior? If there are other tests I can run or information I can provide, please let me know.

I've included three links below:

Expected
* From /z3c/rml/tests/expected/
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7874951/reportlab-pdfs/expected-rml-examples-008-tables.pdf

Actual:
* From /z3c/rml/tests/output/
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7874951/reportlab-pdfs/actual-rml-examples-008-tables.pdf

ReportLab provided:
* From the ReportLab website
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7874951/reportlab-pdfs/from_reportlab_008_tables.pdf

[Kyle MacFarlane (kyle-deletethetrees)]

I've just run into this problem.

Zoom level makes no difference for me in any PDF with any viewer but it's not uncommon for thin lines to appear and disappear at various zoom levels in PDFs.

The ReportLab PDF always displays and prints fine, but I get these results from the expected and actual PDFs.

Adobe Reader 11.0.2 on Windows 8 shows and prints the borders.

Adobe Reader 11.0.2 on OSX 10.8.2 shows the borders but does not print them.

Chrome 25.0.1364.97 on Windows 8 shows the borders but does not print them except for a small bit in the top left of page 1 (I only ever printed page 1 while testing).

Safari 6.0.2 on OSX 10.8.2 doesn't show or print the borders.

Apple Preview 6.0.1 is the same as Safari, possibly they're actually the same viewer?

It turns out that it's easy to fix. Change line 503 in z3c.rml.stylesheet to the following:

        args += self.getAttributeValues(ignore=('kind',), valuesOnly=True, includeMissing=True)

Since all the args are eventually used in ReportLab as positional arguments then the missing values need to be included or the value for dash will end up as an integer instead of a list or None. Seemingly Reader on Windows can cope with that mistake but practically every other viewer doesn't render the borders because they're invalid.

Funnily, this Chromium bug about PDFs generated by Google Spreadsheets seems to be the same thing: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=155038