Ask HN: How do you generate PDFs?

by iBotPeaches on 3/13/2019, 3:03:15 PM with 3 comments
Given a complicated view mixed of HTML & various JavaScript widgets that range from SVG to canvas. How do companies make beautiful PDF reports?

Started with wkhtmltopdf, then started investigating the SASS industry like DocRaptor and the parent PrinceXML.

Started messing with headless Chrome to just take screenshots of the widgets and combine those images into a PDF, but its quite hacky.

What do people do in situations like this?

  • by rexpi0 on 3/13/2019, 3:17:34 PM

    Where we can, we use LaTeX templates. In other places we use Python to generate Word (python-docx) or PowerPoint presentations (python-pptx).

    A few years ago I had success generating WYSIWYG PDFs using HTML5 and the printable classes in CSS Bootstrap (https://getbootstrap.com); in that particular case I used CherryPy (https://cherrypy.org) under IIS and sent the rendered HTML to pdfkit (https://pypi.org/project/pdfkit/) to generate PDFs. That was preferred over relying on the user to print to the page to PDF from their web browser.

  • by jolmg on 3/13/2019, 11:58:16 PM

    There are libraries like ruby's prawn[1].

    [1] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

  • by jamespaden on 3/14/2019, 5:33:13 PM

    Hi, I'm a developer at DocRaptor. What about DocRaptor didn't work for you?