bakso-doc VS flyingsaucer

Cool service! I like that it’s just HTML/CSS but the front end editor looks quite cool.

I also just open sourced part of my app that does PDF generation, but it’s completely bare bones.

I basically wanted a wrapper around the pdf generating part of chromium so that i could generate pdfs on pages within my own app.

Its here if anyone wants to check it out: https://github.com/awongh/bakso-doc

I have been creating print labels with plot/cut lines using css and I used browsers to covert it to PDF. The experience was terrible. While all was perfect on my 1-page proof print, both large browsers messed up the final document (with a few hundred labels on several pages).

Firefox forgot to render images after a few pages. So on some labels the barcodes were not printed.

Chrome looked good at the fist glance. But it turned out that the plot/cut lines (which I created via CSS borders) had been shifted by 1-2mm on _some_ pages. Result was garbage.

I finally switched to https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer which is a high quality HTML/CSS to PDF library. Only drawback is that it only supports CSS 2.1, so some fancy features are not supported like rotating text.

I've used flying saucer pdf[1] for this in the past, but the missing piece always seems to be a descent WYSIWYG template editor. Either open source or paid.

Any suggestions on a web solution that allows non-devs to make great templates would be appreciated.

Historically I've built something simple with Tiny and added a preview button to render, but that super clunky.

[1] https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer

Same, we also use it in conjunction with Flying Saucer PDF to produce PDF reports.

Personnaly, I'm a big fan of Flying Saucer.

Not Kotlin first, but I use Flying Saucer (LGPL licenced) in Java.