asciidoctor-web-pdf VS pdf

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/...

Hi dang, hope you are well. May I kindly ask why not? I spent two weeks writing the CSS / HTML / JavaScript, and did well documented code - in fact the output serves as both documentation of the code and also output from it (in my own stupid way, I was thinking I was following Donald Knuth’s Literate Programming Approach :D).

The repo (https://github.com/ashok-khanna/pdf) contains all the necessary code and is intended for others to reuse in their projects. Some of it isn’t straightforward, despite the guide looking easy - I had to figure out how CSS selectors and counters work for example, how MathJax interacted with Paged.Js.

I think the confusion comes from it being labeled as a “guide”, in fact it’s a full set of code to give the required functionality for high quality PDFs from HTML, using paged.js, the guide is just the self documentation as I figured I might as well use documentation for the sample output. Otherwise, I’d be genuinely curious on what constitutes Show HN vs normal posts?

I think the repo description and the way the output is confusing / unclear - the primary goal is very much meant to be a code base for people to reuse as I’ve noticed for many programmers, the design side can be a bit more elusive.

Separately, would it be possible to add beautiful back to the title - it’s not really about producing PDFs from html as browsers can already do that, and there are many other tools. The main aim is to have the functionality to produce very high quality typeset PDFs from HTML, which until now, I only felt PrinceXML did well and that’s a paid solution. Maybe we could say the title is “High quality PDFs from HTML using Paged.JS”? I know there has been a separate discussion on another thread on the overuse of the word beautiful in describing code - my view is that it has its place when it relates to output / UI.

Thanks for reading, and no issues otherwise (no need to reply).

This looks great -- well done! I'd love to be able to use it (the CSS in particular) in a number of different projects where creating such nice readable output is a hassle. However I couldn't find a license mentioned anywhere -- either for the associated repo as a whole [0] or the CSS specifically.

Would it be possible to add a license so it's possible to know whether others can use this in other projects without rewriting the CSS from scratch?

[0]: https://github.com/ashok-khanna/pdf