asciidoctor-web-pdf VS WeasyPrint

I've been test-driving the web pdf build tool for Asciidoc, asciidoctor-web-pdf[1], for a few years, which uses Paged.js as the template engine before CSS PMM has its go. I like it - I like it a LOT[2] - but Puppeteer-Chrome bugs breaks the build on the regular, or requires a rework of templates. So the web-pdf team started just releasing docker images that include a tested Chromium version (among other things), so as to keep that from being such a PITA. Which is fine. Howaaaayyyyyyyver . . that shines a spotlight on a problem with this workflow: the dependency on browser rendering kit.

[1] https://github.com/ggrossetie/asciidoctor-web-pdf

https://github.com/ggrossetie/asciidoctor-web-pdf

I encourage everyone to take a look at the documentation; this is the markup language I now use for all my personal and professional projects.

https://github.com/ggrossetie/asciidoctor-web-pdf (this is an implementation of Paged.js +CSS for the Asciidoc markup language, as an alternative to asciidoctor-pdf [Ruby/Prawn] or asciidoctor-fopub [Docbook-XSL].)

We're currently ironing out the bugs for parallel AsciiDoc > PDF generation for downloadable/offline versions anyway, so once that's sorted we can use those for review again. Much as I hated writing book-style PDF help docs, Acrobat's commenting/review features are actually pretty hard to replace.

Asciidoctor-web-pdf https://github.com/Mogztter/asciidoctor-web-pdf for web-based PDF with Paged.JS and CSS.

You'll get extremely consistent output from Asciidoc, but I'm not gonna lie: customizing format is going to be a learning curve no matter what compared to MSO. Tweaking either 1) asciidoctor-pdf's yaml themes, 2) docbook-xsl overrides, or 3) asciidoctor-web-pdf's CSS and JS (via Paged.js Paged Media Module implementation). And if your parent org uses Office365 up and down the chain, Word publishing can be automated . . fairly well. You'll still get some surprises, but it's Word. It's the lingua franca for a reason.

How you turn including files into deliverables, there's a few paths, but HTML is the "natural" output, and PDF can be made with a few different tools depending on what the output format is required to look like. DocBook-XSL is a more complex but configurable processor, while the Ruby-based asciidoctor-pdf is the easier, more Honda-like option. I'm pretty fond of the "web-pdf" method (https://github.com/Mogztter/asciidoctor-web-pdf) which uses Paged.js and CSS to style the print document, but your mileage may vary depending on your CSS comfort level.

Asciidoctor has a web PDF tool that just went alpha a little bit ago, uses the same stack as the OP's thingie.

https://github.com/Mogztter/asciidoctor-web-pdf

The content handoff goes like this: Asciidoc (using defined roles) generates HTML5 (Pagedjs polyfills page areas / pagination stuff), CSS styles stuff, and Puppeteer runs a headless Chromium for the pdf render. It's straight from CSS GCPM W3C spec, a flavor of CSS Paged Media, drafts that have been percolating since frickin' 2006 but have never seen browser implementation.

Just use asciidoc.

E.g.

- https://github.com/Mogztter/asciidoctor-web-pdf/tree/master/...

Is there a reason you didn't consider something like Weasyprint?

https://weasyprint.org

I've gone through a number of systems to convert CV's, business cards, and other docs and it hasn't let me down yet.

You don't _have_ to use a browser. I had very good results with Weasyprint [0]. And there's also PrinceXML [1] if you're willing to pay.

[0]: https://weasyprint.org/

Thanks for your answer! I imagined you would be using PrinceXML behind the scenes since that is probably the gold standard in HTML+CSS rendering.

The only open source alternative I know of is WeasyPrint at https://weasyprint.org/. I'm not sure how well it fares against PrinceXML, though.

And thanks for the pointer to Taffy - I didn't know it before!

Flexbox support has been [included][1] since 2018, although my use case was the prototypical one - a single row w/ 3 columns - so YMMV with how it handles more complex layouts.

[1]: https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/pull/579

Performance is not the strength of WeasyPrint, meaning that heavy HTML files will increase generation time. You should always compress images before attaching them, as they are not compressed by default. Generating a 50-page-long PDF may take up to a minute in extreme cases, although multi-page documents generated on my project take fewer than 2 seconds to generate.

For Python there is Weasyprint: you prepare the invoice as an HTML document, and Weasyprint turns it into a PDF

https://weasyprint.org/

Well yes, but you can implement HTML+CSS. WeasyPrint did from scratch, and independent implementations of HTML+CSS are considerably more numerous than HTML+CSS+JS.

In a recent project I used https://github.com/Kozea/WeasyPrint/ it is written in python, so you will need to use it like so:

You should maybe check out weasyprint. https://weasyprint.org/