Bug 39208

Summary: printoverdues.sh requires unavailable cli tool xhtml2pdf
Product: Koha Reporter: Alexander Wagner <alexander.wagner>
Component: Command-line UtilitiesAssignee: Bugs List <koha-bugs>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Testopia <testopia>
Severity: normal    
Priority: P5 - low CC: mtj, robin
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
GIT URL: Change sponsored?: ---
Patch complexity: --- Documentation contact:
Documentation submission: Text to go in the release notes:
Version(s) released in:
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Description Alexander Wagner 2025-02-27 11:46:16 UTC
`printoverdues.sh` relies on `xhtml2pdf` for the conversion of a HTML document to a printable PDF version of said document.

At time of writing, this tool dropped out of Debian (bookworm) and Ubuntu stable and sometimes older releases including backports and the like. Debian oldstable still keeps it, but no upstream releases beyond.

This may endanger the functionality in Koha upstream.

Possible solutions:

- Manual installation outside the package management (and bugfixing) of the distribution via `pip`. That would also require a suitable documentation.
- Use an alternative tool chain within the distributions (e.g. pandoc, if heading for a swiss army knife of format transformations. For PDF pandoc would require latex as "helper").

Note that `printoverdues.sh` is referred to explicitly in the implementation checklist.