TCPDF VS WKHTMLToPDF

Other popular PDF libraries include TCPDF, FPDF, and Snappy.

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.

Some of those problems I had in the past, but at the time I was just rendering tables for a financial report. The main problem I remember having was the CSS part and the long generation time. Because I was not implementing the styling at the time, the CSS part was not really my problem, and I am sure wicked_pdf provides some default styles to help in this part. The long processing times were a problem because we were generating pdfs with over 100 pages, this process would take about 5 min and would get worse if more pdfs were being requested in parallel. I can’t remember what the solution was at the time but I think we ended up generating some pdfs in the background and sending them by email when ready. The wicked_pdf gem uses an instance of https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf under the hood. This causes problems because it can only generate pdfs one by one. The solution would probably be having a dedicated service that would orchestrate multiple wkhtmltopdf instances.

We’ll start with the WickedPDF gem, which is powered by the wkhtmltopdf command-line library.

The only “sane” way I’ve found to be able to deal with pdfs is through this tool https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

wget + https://wkhtmltopdf.org/

Thanks for the suggestion! KnpSnappyBundle was my initial way to go as well, but my pages use quite some Javascript (chartJs) to render and I couldn’t get wkhtmltopdf to work with it. As it seems wkhtmltopdf does not support ES6 https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf/issues/3596 so I was forced to find another way.

wkhtmltopdf — Generates PDFs from HTML documents.

Of the HTML-based pdf-engines pandoc supports, prince would have the best typography, but I don't like recommending Prince because it's proprietary and costs money. (I try to stick to open source when I can.) wkhtmltopdf is the fastest, but uses a pretty old codebase, and doesn't even support paged/print css. weasyprint is a little better in my experience, but still has a ways to go typographically. pagedjs-cli is just a wrapper around headless Chrome/Chromium, and while Chrome has made improvements with regard to typography, Google turns off some of those features (e.g., hyphens) in headless mode, which is annoying.

Concerning pdf there is the well known wkhtmltopdf , but let me say that I love the not so well known percollate

Did you try wkhtmltopdf and WeasyPrint, by any chance?