TCPDF VS pandoc

Generating PDF documents out of your app's HTML output is a very common requirement and there are several open source libraries to accomplish this. I came across this need for my project recently and I evaluated many popular ones such as TCPDF, mpdf, FPDF, etc. But the one that truly stood up to my evaluation in terms of efficiency (minimal footprint) and ease of implementation was DOMPDF.

Leveraging Laravel for PDF generation involves utilizing its built-in features or integrating third-party packages. The framework supports popular packages like dompdf and TCPDF, making it easy to implement PDF generation with minimal effort.

TCPDF has full support for rendering an EPS into a PDF.

It can be fussy.

https://tcpdf.org/

Idk what’s the big problem. Maybe it’s just something like https://tcpdf.org ? Using that for years.

Depending on if this is a web-based project or not this suggestion might not be suitable. But the last few projects like this I did that were web-based I have used Google Charts with TCPDF. I rendered the charts on the page as a "print preview", and since TCPDF supports basic HTML composition I saved out the charts as generated images and submitted them to the server which generates a PDF. Bit convoluted but that was what I came up with in a hurry.

Running a headless browser to render HTML is a resource intensive task. If you only need to generate simple documents, you're better off using a tool that generates PDF directly. In the old days we used FPDF and its successors (TCPDF was the most popular). Both seem to have recent releases. There's also mPDF , that seems to be another child of FPDF.

You may want to look at a PDF library (Python/PHP/Perl/Java, etc.) You can do all you mention with a lot of flexibility. tcPDF comes immediately to mind, there is also a Python port. If you want to learn a language, i recommend python. Learning how to make a basic program when it is something that you want, and you know what you want is a great way to learn.

I would also look at dompdf and tcPDF, they would have very advantages if you intend to revise/reprint your documentation.

The original site still has it available for download, but most importantly, a ton of examples and documentation, that while I haven't tried the github version, probably works based on the same as the old.

My main authoring tool is then Emacs Markdown Mode (https://jblevins.org/projects/markdown-mode/). For data entry, it comes with some bells and whistles similar to org-mode, like C-c C-l for inserting links etc.

I seldom export my notes for external usage, but if it is the case, I use lowdown (https://kristaps.bsd.lv/lowdown/) which also comes with some nice output targets (among the more unusual are Groff and Terminal). Of cource pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does a very good job here, too.

This is one of those things that the ever-amazing pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) does very well, on top of supporting virtually every other document format.

Folks feel the same way about Markdown versus LaTeX: why use something significantly more complicated where a looser, human-readable grammar works better?

For any other situations, I use https://pandoc.org/, or, generate a Word doc scriptomatically.

pandoc toolchain pour builder une version confortable/imprimable en phase de travail (ePub, pdf, docx, html)

Congrats on the launch, I guess, but there are so many free options that I can't think of a situation where paying $0.25 per document would be justified...? Just to name a few:

Back in the days, I used to use XSL-FO [0] and it was okay. It was not very precise but it rarely if ever broke, and was perfectly integrated with an XML/XSLT solution. Yeah, this was a long time ago.

Last month I used html-to-pdfmake [1] and it's also not very precise and more fragile, but very efficient and fast.

Yet another approach would be to pro grammatically generate .rtf files (for example) and use Pandoc [2] to produce PDFs (I have not tried this in production but don't see why it wouldn't work).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/html-to-pdfmake

[2] https://pandoc.org/

Others have mentioned static site generators. I like Hakyll [1] because it can tightly integrate with Pandoc [2] and allows you to develop custom solutions if your needs ever grow.

[1]: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

[2]: https://pandoc.org/

Have you compared it with a conversion by pandoc (https://pandoc.org/)?

I have used it to kickstart a blogging project that I wish to come back to soon. The Lua inter-op for custom readers, writers and filters is great but I wish there was more editor integration and even perhaps an official IDE/editor with built-in debugging features (probably something already do-able with Emacs but I haven't checked). The only blocker for my project is no support for "ChunkedDoc" for Lua filters [1] which forces me to write more code and a complicated Makefile.

[1]: https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/9061